In Branicki, there are lots of brains, both alive ones in the crania of students and staff, and dead ones in jars lining the shelves, but none of them has ever once been put towards making a good experience for visitors.

I don't expect attractions like Branicki Palace to bend over backwards for English-only speakers; I'm there to appreciate the aesthetic quality, and any English audioguides or information boards, if present, are simply a bonus. In Branicki, though, it seems like they detract rather than add to the experience. Because the Palace is still in use as a medical university, you are only given access with a guide present; as such, you get shepherded around the few rooms of the palace which can be visited today, with a Polish your group. Many of these rooms are too small to fit everyone, so everyone shuffles about waiting their turn to go in while the guide talks, and squeezing past each other in doorways. The guide has lots to say, in Polish, but none of it has been transferred to the audioguide, which plods along through its barebones script with contagious boredom, speaking as slowly as possible to disguise the fact that almost no information about the Palace is being relayed to you at all. Many of the rooms fail to display a number for the audioguide entry, leaving foreigners to cross-reference it yourself against the map you're given at the start. (You also receive the translation of a script: at one point, you are sat down and made to watch the corresponding video, unsubtitled, in Polish, while the lights are turned off leaving you with no way to read the translation.) As such, the visit could take you half an hour by yourself, but you're forced to spend ninety minutes there in relative boredom. What's especially saddening is that almost every other city and attraction I visited in Poland had audioguides of a high quality—all, it seemed, utilising the same narrator, who I guess couldn't make it as far east as Bialystok.

All in all, it's not a bad attraction, the building and the grounds are very pretty, and two or three of the rooms would have been worth visiting under any other circumstances, but I don't really recommend actually going in. And since Bialystok is so rarely visited by foreign tourists, there is probably little incentive to change that in the future—and Bialystok will remain so rarely visited.

Oh, and they had a nice big Lenin painting aptly shoved in the basement.