Shopping in Warsaw

In 1985 the law required that we buy enough Polish Zloties to insure that we spend at least $30 US each day we were in the country. That will just about pay for the gasoline we need.

We stood in an unnecessary line at a bakery store. There were five clerks, and one of them waited on a customer once in awhile. There was plenty of bread and butter, but the clerks were not about to be busy. At one street market we bought two bananas for about $1.85 each. Someone smuggled them into Warsaw, as we were told they never see bananas otherwise.

In 1985, between Warsaw and Kraków, there were some roadside fruit and vegetable tables, with only a small box with a dozen pieces of poor quality fruit. In 1991, large wagons and roadside stands were loaded with nice looking produce. After the Berlin Wall fell, that change took only about a year.

In Warsaw’s old town dozens of stands sold Matroska dolls, that fit one inside the other. A popular item had smallest of the stacked wooden dolls painted with the picture of Lenin, the next Stalin, then Khrushchev, then Brezhnev, and finally Gorbachev on the largest one (maybe eight inches high). There were also carriages drawn by beautiful teams of horses, waiting for customers who wanted to parade through the city streets.

Stadion Dziesieciolecia (could seat maybe 70,000), in the Praga district next to the Poniatowskiego Bridge, was the location of Warsaw’s flea market. Said to be the largest in Eastern Europe with as many as 100,000 visitors, crowds of people kept coming and going all day long, visiting the thousands of vendor booths that circled round and round the outside of the stadium. A “booth” ranged from maybe three feet wide, to some of the larger ones where major capitalists used small trucks to transport and display all their goods.

We fought our way around Warsaw's stadium two times, and found not one “flea” for sale. There were clothes, radios, video tapes, suitcases, and on and on, but nothing that we cared for. Not even one cane or stick for my collection. The only thing we bought was a bar-b-qued Polish sausage for Emmy.

I said going to the Warsaw flea market was like going to a stadium for a major league football game — not as a spectator in the bleachers, but as a player down on the field. Such pushing and shoving you have never seen.