Polish Pottery Shopping
My grandparents introduced my mom to "Polish Pottery" when they lived in Munich in the '90s. She fell in love with it. She bakes in it, she serves in it, she has pretty much replaced all of her other dishes with the stuff. After I got married, I slowly started to buy up pieces for myself and a few for my mother in law and my sister in law. The problem is, the pottery is very expensive here in the States. It is an incredible investment but hard to do for newly weds.
We knew that we would be able to do some shopping for pottery in Warsaw, we just didn't know what the prices would be like. Let me tell you, they were amazing! They are about 1/3 of the prices we pay here in the States. So we did a lot of shopping! We only had time to go to four stores in Warsaw but I wanted to talk a little about each one.
Store #1- This is the first store that we found that had a big selection of pottery. It is in the Old Town and is on one of the main streets between two ice cream shops. There was an entire room filled to the top with pottery. This did make it difficult to look at pieces but one of the employees was happy to help. We had him pull down a lot of different pieces and probably shopped for about 2 hours. We ended up buying 20 pieces of pottery so he didn't mind helping. Once we bought everything, the store wrapped it all up in bubble wrap for us. It was a pleasant experience and I would recommend shopping there.
Store #2- We went here on our second day on the recommendation of a woman we ran into in the first shop. This store was massive in comparison to the last one! Some many things, and luckily they were easier to get to and look at! The owner spoke very good English (much better than my Polish!) and was incredibly helpful. Once she realized that we were buying a lot of pieces, she allowed us to start a pile in a corner so we didn't have to carry it around. The last picture in this series shows all the pieces we bought! The store owner even offered to ship it! We obviously had to pay the additional cost but she gave us a 20% discount for buying so much. Turns out this woman has a website and ships all over the world! I highly recommend shopping with her!
Polish Pottery- Boleslawiec
ul. Freta 14
00-227 Warszawa
Polska
www.e-manufaktura.com
Store #3- This shop was tucked away behind a staircase in a strip mall on the same block at the InterContinental. It was a smaller store than the previous one but they had some lovely pieces. The woman that was working there was very helpful and packaged everything up in a box when we finished.
Store #4- I have no pictures from this store because they had no picture signs everywhere! We wanted to go in this store for several days because it was massive! When we finally had the chance, we were drooling over the beautiful pieces they had, we wanted them all. Since there were no baskets and no where to put all of things we wanted, my mom and I found a quiet corner and started putting the pieces we wanted to buy there. After a few minutes, a woman came over and started yelling at us in Polish. We don't speak Polish and she didn't speak English. She had another woman from the store come over to talk to us. The second woman had been watching us since we had started putting our pieces down and knew what we had been doing. She explained to the first woman that we were actually buying the items (not playing with them like I'm sure she thought we were). The first woman left in a rage and the second woman stuck around to make sure we didn't need anything else. Since our business was obviously not wanted, we started to put the larger pieces back. We only ended up buying about 1/3 of what we originally were going to buy.
I learned two things from all of this shopping:
- The people of Warsaw are not used to people coming into their pottery shops and buying more than one or two pieces. So when we wanted to buy a lot, they really didn't know what to do with us.
- I need to learn Polish.