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Street Prophets Friday: The Summer Palace Grounds of King Jan III (open thread/photo diary) [1]

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Date: 2025-07-04

Greetings and welcome to another of my fuzzy-headed, little open threads featuring a slideshow of photos from my Spring trip to Warsaw.

'Tis the Fourth of July, Josh's birthday and yes, ol’ buddy the fireworks really were always in your honor. This time last year I was in the jolly ol’ USA, avoiding the fireworks as I usually do these days. No danger of fireworks damaging my hearing tonight. Too damn dry around here anyway. We could sure use a little rain.

Mrs the Werelynx and I had our Thursday in Warsaw all to ourselves. Her conference was done and the night before we'd watched a Czech travel documentary about Warsaw while contemplating a list of recommended places to visit from her brother whose own in-laws live in Warsaw.

While watching the documentary I learned about the iconic tower that I'd drawn a sketch of on Tuesday and had Mrs the Werelynx deliver to our host Ewa on Wednesday as a little token of my thanks for allowing me to join her and her colleagues when we arrived on Monday for their luncheon, a walking tour of a portion of Warsaw and a party that evening. I learned that the tower, known as the Palace of Culture and Science also has another name commonly used by the locals. As it was a “gift” from Stalin, built just after World War Two at great expense to the Polish people, it had been dubbed—

“Stalin’s Penis” an A5 format watercolor painting by yours truly.

So, I discovered that I'd just sent our sweet, adorable, charming host Ewa— a dick pic.

Mrs the Werelynx reassured me though that Ewa had been thrilled to receive the picture, had been showing it off to everyone at the conference, and that no, I didn't need to offer to exchange it for the sketch I'd made on Wednesday.

Such are the risks of being an ignorant tourist.

On Thursday we decided to branch out a bit, we’d both seen quite a lot of the downtown and there were a couple of palaces on our list of recommendations. We picked the Palace at Wilanów.

Setting off from our hotel

Turns out the bus station is just across the street from the mall with the remarkable roof.

After getting off the bus there was still a bit of a walk.

We passed by the front of Saint Anne's Church

The Potocki Mausoleum

More about the Palace at Wilanów can be found at the official website.

We arrived at the gate and were a little surprised to find that we needed to get a ticket at a little vending machine off to one side. We were even more surprised to find that the tickets were free, but they got us through the turnstiles.

We stepped into the main building to see if we could get a tour of the interior spaces and a polite man working at the cloak room pointed to where we could find a vending machine for that. A touch screen informed us that there were still spaces available at certain times and so we picked one that would give us plenty of time to roam the grounds and received our ticket— again, for free!

There were many works displayed inside one of the side buildings where tropical plants were once grown. The pieces were to be auctioned off for charity.

Down into the informal gardens, we aimed for that bridge in the distance— turns out, you can't reach it from inside the park.

There was some interesting rubble in the woods to ponder on our way

And this lovely structure

Such a picturesque bridge, too bad.

But the boat house wasn't too shabby

And I'm afraid I'll have to leave it there for now. Many of the photos of the grounds I thought I'd transferred to the ol ’laptop for use out here in the country somehow stayed back in the big city. I'll see what I can do to correct things for next week when I should be able to bring you some photos from inside the impressive palace itself. Treats for lovers of museums and oriental art.

In the meantime, thanks for stopping by.

This is an open thread. Anything you wish to share in the comments is welcome. Please feel free to promote diaries, charities, reliable rock crusher retailers or whatever has caught your eye around the world wide web lately. Share a bit of yourself or a bit of what's for dinner. Friends are grilling out some treats for us over here this evening and by the time we get back this little diary should be about ready to go live. Looking forward to seeing you in the comments.

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