Name: Poland | Europe's Most Underrated Travel Destination?
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T18:20:43.000Z
Duration: 15 min 18 s
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What's up, everybody? I'm Alex, a.k.a. Alex the Vagabond, and you are watching Vagabrothers.

Adverbs of manner

In this video series, I'll be exploring Poland, specifically the regions of Warmia and Masuria in collaboration with the Polish Tourism Organization.

Modal verbs - B1

For those of you who are subscribers, you may be wondering where Marko is.

He's taking a little vacation back in California, so I'm bringing my fiancé, Cary Rad, to explore this beautiful country with me.

It is a beautiful day in Warsaw, in the capital of Poland.

Today we're going to be leaving the city and heading out into the countryside to the Lake District of Warmia, and Masuria.

It's going to be super beautiful, super fun.

We have a lot to do, but we also have a lot of ground to cover.

It's time to grab our bags, hop in the car, and head north. Let's do this.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we are at our first destination of the trip.

We're going to be taking a cruise down the Eblatski Canal.

It's got a very unique setup that does not exist anywhere else in the world.

The canals were connected at certain points by a train track-like situation, which we're going to find out more about when we ride.

I came into this activity not really knowing what we were doing, and now I'm like, what the hell?

This is a cool way to start things off here in Poland, checking out this canal.

It took 16 years to complete, and at the time, it was the world's most advanced hydraulic project.

Altogether, it connects over 150 kilometers of waterways.

This very eccentric, innovative system of canals was a workaround through which they could get their products to market without having to pay exorbitant taxes.

Nowadays, it's really just used for tourism, but it's an interesting way to kind of get a feel of an earlier age here in Poland.

Anyways, let's hop in the car, head to the next spot.

Our next destination is a little unusual, a little unexpected.

Right now, we are at Snail Garden, and it is an organic farm that produces snails, primarily for export to France and Spain.

If you know anything about French or Spanish gastronomy, you'll know that the caracol, or as the French call it, escargot, it's a delicacy.

Here at this farm, at the Snail Garden, it's all organic, and we're finding out a little bit more about how snails are farmed and end up on plates at fancy restaurants in France and Spain.

This is a snail, a large, very large, four-year-old snail that is checking the pH level of my skin to see if he finds it to be a comfortable spot to come out of his shell.

I understand. Once he comes out, he'll be cute.

He's all the way out. We've got a one-year-old.

This is the biggest snail in the world, from Zanzibar, quite large.

This is his little cousin from mainland Tanzania, not quite as large, but that is a big, big snail.

Pretty interesting little story about how he got involved with snails.

He read an article in a farming magazine about snails and decided to start raising snails, and now he's the leading authority on snail farming in Poland.

I didn't even know that snail farming was a thing.

There's also a bistro back there that has snail snacks.

We've stopped for a delicious ice cream, and now we're going to burn off those calories by taking a little walk through the Toborska Pine Reservation.

Toborska Pines are native here to Poland, and they were very highly prized because they're extremely straight, and the branches only really grow at the top third of the tree.

They made great masts for ships back in the day, hence the canal to get the timber out to the Baltic Sea and then onwards to the rest of the world.

Walking through here now, there's something very interesting happening.

The pine trees are starting to be out-competed.

The beech, another type of tree, the beech tree, is better suited to the soil, and it's kind of like a succession.

The pines were here. They're still here, but there's not a lot of young pines growing, and that's because the forest floor is being populated by young beech trees.

Who knows? In a hundred years, maybe this pine forest won't be pine anymore.

This is just so relaxing to be in a forest like this.

Every breath you take is just filling you up with fresh, clean oxygen.

I think that nowadays in our modern culture, we forget about the importance of forests and trees.

These living creatures are actually giving us oxygen, and they're taking away carbon dioxide, which as we all know, with climate change, the more carbon that's in the environment and in the atmosphere, the worse we all do, the hotter it gets.

The importance of forests and forest preserves like this one can't be understated.

This forest is home to all sorts of animals, foxes, badgers, pine marten, deer.

It's really nice to just kind of start things off with a nice, mellow walk in the woods like that

I'm liking the way that this trip is starting off.

We had a super relaxing evening here last night watching the sunset over the lake, but today we're going to be heading to another town, Olsten.

It's one of the major cities here in the region, and we're going to be checking out Ukil Lake, which is one of the biggest and most beautiful lakes in the lake region.

After that, we'll be heading to a thermal hot spring for a little bit of relaxation at the spa.

It's the capital of this region, and it's famous for its medieval old town and some really interesting architecture.

We're going to pop inside and see what's up.

The city of Olsten was founded in 1353 by the Teutonic Knights.

Teutonic Knights were a religious military order originally founded to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land.

But once the Holy Land fell, the Teutonic

Knights moved northwards, and they made their way to the Prussia region on the Baltic Sea.

It was reverted to Polish control in the mid-1400s, but statues like this were the reason the Teutonic Knights came here. This statue is from pre-Christianity. It was built by pagan people, and that was kind of the excuse that the Teutonic Knights had to come to this region to try to

Right now we are in Olsten Castle, and in the 1500s, a very important person lived here.

But at the time, he wasn't all that important.

Nicholas Copernicus lived here and worked as an administrator for the town of Olsten. During his free time, he was practicing astronomy, and on his death, he would release a theory that would upend what was believed about the heavens, the heliocentric theory that the planets revolved around the sun and not the earth.