Warsaw 2009: shopping

Finally getting back to the trip to Warsaw ... better late than never. :-)

Of course we had to do some shopping while we were there. We'd heard that clothes were relatively cheap and shoes especially. This did pan out although we did of course try to be sensible. ;-) There are lots of little shops all around the side streets downtown, but since we had limited time to look around we decided to check out one of the malls in the city too. We'd read about one that was supposed to be top of the line, Arkadia. It was very easy to get to from downtown, we just jumped on a bus and it took, what, 15-20 minutes. It's new and fancy and from the outside definitely looked the part.

Inside too. :-) It was new and bright and very clean and tidy. And huge ... !! Bigger than it looked from outside.

And with all kinds of stores. Actually even a bigger selection than you'd get in a mall in this country, since I'm pretty sure there's no mall in Norway that has its own butcher shop. Cool. We bought some sausages made from wild boar. o_O

One of the first things I saw was a multimedia store with music, DVDs and lots of books. Almost all of them in Polish though. Check out these shelves, they're all Polish-language fantasy. I mean, in Polish originally. That is so cool. I so wished I'd been able to read any of these books.

In a wonderful gift shop we found, among other things, this huge soft toy cow. My mother has mad cow disease ;-) and she was quite tempted by this creature ... but of course we didn't buy it. Come on, that would be crazy. *cough*

There was a pet store there, a huge one, and of course I had to browse there for a bit. I bought some treats for KAS and trilltrall's hamsters. :-) It was a great store, but it was kind of weird too ... it's the only pet store I've ever seen where they sell both pets and fishing supplies. o_O

As I've mentioned, reptiles are illegal as pets in this country, so I'm not at all used to seeing them for sale in pet stores. When they do become legal I hope that only registered breeders will be allowed to sell them, though. It's sad to see animals in stores like this. Especially the turtle (a Greek tortoise of some variety) was completely passive, it was sad to see it.

The lizard was quite perky though. :-)

The American bookstore. English books, yay! I couldn't stop myself from buying a stack of them. Well, they had a 3-for-2 sale. I saved money. I especially looked for Polish fiction in English, and I found two, Death in Breslau and Snow White and Russian Red. I'm looking forward to reading them.

Some things you can never escape, no matter where you go ... ;-)

The day after we were walking around looking for something else entirely when we came across this amazing bookstore. Really amazing. I mean, wow. :-)

Unfortunately, almost everything they had was in Polish. But we really enjoyed looking around there. The children's book section was fantastic.

We looked for some familiar names, and again, some things are just universal. :-)

I found books that I liked even without being able to read a word in them ...

... and, yay, look what I found ... ! I was almost tempted to buy it. ;-)