Poland has been booming economically, so it’s full of new things. For example, you are riding the train through an obscure industrial town full of factories. “Rust Belt,” you think, but then you notice … there’s no rust. All the factories were built in the 21st Century, probably for German firms. Downtown in this place you last heard of while reading about tank battles on the Eastern Front in 1945, there might be a few new blue glass skyscrapers like you lately see in Jersey City across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
Both places I stayed in Poland looked like they’d been wholly refurbished with the latest technology since 2023. In Krakow, it took me 15 sweltering minutes to figure out what the countless buttons on the air conditioner remote control did. But when I finally got the hang of the remote, the AC worked as rapidly as any in Houston.
One newish thing you see a lot in Poland at tourist attractions like Wawel Castle in Krakow are ten-foot long bronze scale models of the site with Braille explanations for blind tourists. (These exist in other countries as well, but they seemed far more common in Krakow and Warsaw than in Berlin, Prague, or Vienna.)
I saw one blind tourist running his hands over a model, but lots of kids liked them too.