Month 10 in Poland - May 2026

 Hi everyone,

The Evjes were busy in May! We had opportunities to travel a bit. School is continuing but winding down for the boys. And the weather is turning warmer. With the approaching summer, our thoughts are also starting to shift to our impending return to California in August. Read below for more!

• At the start of May, we hopped over to Brussels for a weekend city-break. We visited old friends there (the Wernerts, who many of you in Davis know). We enjoyed reconnecting with them, played baseball in a park (a very rare sight in Europe), and generally ate glorious amounts of Belgian fries, waffles, and mussels. We visited a cool science museum called the Atomium which is less of a building and more of a large, interactive sculpture with rooms and elevators inside. I encourage you to look it up and learn more about it. In general we recommend Brussels as a European city. It's often overlooked and underrated vs some of the other flashier tourist spots (Venice, Barcelona, Paris, etc) but we found it very enjoyable to be there.
• Later in the month we did a long weekend in Croatia during the kids' school breaks. We rented a car and basically beach hopped from Split to Dubrovnik. Highly recommend. I won't go into too much detail but if you want to nerd out on Google Maps here are all the places to look up: Trogir, Primosten, Sibenik, Makarska, Ston, Slano, Srebreno, Mlini, and Cavtat. We ate copious amounts of seafood. Oysters and octopus are the thing here, and they are very fresh. You can see the oyster farms from the road, marked by the little traps sticking up from the water's surface. One fun thing we did was visit the Krka waterfall National Park. While there, we recreated a family photo to mirror a photo from a trip Monika and her family took when she was 15.

Besides the travelogue, a new feature in these updates is offering cultural observations about living in Poland that you wouldn't know unless you lived here. These are quirky tendencies about the country we've noticed over time in our nearly 12 months here.

For example, Polish people as a country are still very connected to the countryside and the land. Poland has a long history of being a rural, agrarian society. Almost every family has at least one or two properties they keep and go to regularly in the countryside. Everybody knows a farmer personally and has access to their products be it eggs, meat, milk, and the like. As a result of this, there are very few preservatives in food, and food spoils quite quickly here. We find ourselves throwing out things that we haven't eaten as quickly as we thought we would. Fridges are smaller in Poland (everthing is smaller by American standards), so trips to the grocery store are much more frequent, almost daily.

Another example of a cultural tendency we observe here is what I'll call harmless lawlessness. I don't quite know how else to describe it. An example is parking. In the US, if you drive your car to a parking lot and don't park in the designated spaces painted on the ground then you are considered a rebellious agent of chaos. Here, striped parking spots are more of a... suggestion. People will park wherever there is space. They will find ways to create their own parking spot somehow. Polish people are experts at this guerrila parking method.

Another example of harmless lawlessness is the gym. Nobody reracks their weights. People cut in front of each other during sets with minimal courtesies exchanged. The lockeroom experience is also different than the states. In the US, if a men's bathroom or locker room needs to be cleaned, they typically close the whole thing so a (usually female) janitor crew can go in there and clean it. In Poland, this is not the case. The cleaning ladies come right in with their gear while men in full view change clothes and bear all while they do it. Nobody bats an eye or thinks this is unusual in the slightest.

Written by Tyler