The Republic of Poland (alternative Commonwealth of Poland) is a country located in Central Europe, between Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, and the Baltic Sea, Lithuania, and Russia (in the form of the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave) to the north.
The Polish landscape consists almost entirely of the lowlands of the North European Plain, at an average height of 173 metres, though the Sudetes (including the Karkonosze) and the Carpathian Mountains (including the Tatra mountains, where one also finds Poland's highest point, Rysy, at 2,499 m.) form the southern border. Several large rivers cross the plains; for instance, the Vistula (Wisla), Oder (Odra), Warta the (Western) Bug. Poland also contains over 9,300 lakes, predominantly in the north of the country. Masuria (Mazury) forms the largest and most-visited lake district in Poland. Remains of the ancient forests survive: see list of forests in Poland. Poland enjoys a temperate climate, with cold, cloudy, moderately severe winters and mild summers with frequent showers and thunder showers.
The Polish State Railways (PKP) is one of the larger railway systems of central and western Europe, with 23,420 kilometers in its network (1998). Refurbishment of the network has commenced to bring standards into line with western European railway networks.
By Western European standards, Poland has a relatively poor infrastructure of expressways/highways. The Government has undertaken a programme to improve the standard of a number of significant national highways by 2013.
Poland has eight major airports (in decreasing order of traffic: Warsaw, Krakow, Katowice, Gdansk, Poznan, Wroclaw, Szczecin and Rzeszow), a total of 123 airports and airfields, as well as three heliports.
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