Our alarm wakes us up and, although it’s a shame to be leaving Berlin (so much more to explore, like getting out to the Olympic Stadium, seeing more of West Berlin and exploring more small bars and Brauhauses), at least we aren’t missing much in terms of the weather; it’s still raining outside.
We finish packing, check-out and then are soon outside by the bus stop. It’s been a really great hotel in terms of location – much closer than we thought to all the sites we wanted to see around the Museum Island and on a bus route directly from the station. At the station we have half an hour before the train so get some breakfast in a coffee/croissant deal. We’re paying where we can with our Post Office credit card (no commission) but this place cheekily changes the currency into GBP before the transaction. We’ve come across this before, in France, where some businesses are able to use their own currency converter to change the price into your own currency. Might be useful for some people, but for us we know it’s not as good a deal. Behind us, the TV news features a story that – although we don’t understand the subtitles – has pictures of a lot of umbrellas, a lot of rain, and a lot of miserable people (including a damp queue of people on Museum Island – they must’ve just missed us from the frame!). We assume it’s a comment on the unseasonable weather we’ve been experiencing.
We’re in a compartment again for this journey, and have it to ourselves for the first 45 minutes. As the train is leaving the station we ride across town through the grey of Berlin’s concrete housing blocks. Away from the cultural quarter where we were staying, East Berlin really does seem to conform to the architecture you expect. Identical high-rise buildings gather around concrete gardens. The small stations are square and squat. The miserable weather adds to the effect.
As we pass into Poland our mobile phones begin chirping with text messages from Orange again. We begin to regret deleting them before taking a photo, because they’re a fun little record of our journey. But the truth is they’re a complete pain – every change of country has triggered three texts to each of us, but they haven’t all come through at the same time. Both in Amsterdam and in Berlin mine have arrived at about 1am: not the best wake up call when you’re fast asleep!
The high rainfall is evident from the flooded rivers we go over. In one place we see a small group of trees submerged. It certainly explains the high flow rate of the Spree when we were in Berlin. It was causing white water as it came through one particular weir, and on our last night was bashing moored boats against the quay.
Once in Poland the number of people getting on and off the train increases, as do the number of ticket checks. A man circulates the train with his cart of snacks and drinks. He peers through the door and begins a stream of Polish. It sounds so unlike anything else we’ve heard on route – French, Flemish, Dutch, German – and we begin to realise that the Polish phrasebook borrowed from the Ps will probably come in very handy.
At one point our compartment is full, and the unlucky people in the centre seats without a table or arm rest do an intricate dance to buy coffee, take off the lid, pour in the milk, stir, and then reseal the cup without anything to rest it on. Our offers of the tables near us are met with knowing smirks as we show that the tables don’t go flat and would be more of a hindrance than a help to their coffee preparations.
We pass a very large amount of farmland. Enormous fields stretch into the distance – some growing crops while others house a range of animals. The housing, on the whole, is little different to what we’ve seen on the rest of the journey east, but in the larger villages and towns we pass there are noticeably more square concrete constructions. On the rural side though things are a lot more basic, with some dilapidated barns and single track crossings of the railway line.
We pull into Warsaw Central station just after 3pm and take our platform sign photo beside the train. Others do the same – either everyone has the same idea, or we’ve started a trend.
We make our way up to the main concourse. We’ve read up in the Lonely Planet that signage isn’t Warsaw’s strong point and we must agree that it isn’t clear that you have to go up a second set of stairs to leave the station. Nor is it clear where the ticket office is once you are at ground level, and we find ourselves on the street being directed back inside through a different door before we start seeing something that resembles a ticket hall / concourse. Inside there is a row of windows and a snake of people waiting to be seen. We spy a Travel Centre and an Information Centre so head in the opposite direction as we’d read that the Travel Centre has English speakers to help you book your tickets – would the queues here be even longer then?
We take a number in the Travel Centre and start to wait our turn. Hoping that it won’t take the “hour” quoted in one guide book to book the tickets Alice pops off to the Information Centre to see if they have any maps – Warsaw is the one city on our journey for which we have no map. The main tourist information centre has been moved apparently during the building work in the station and so this place is very limited and seems to have information on hiring a car and physical activities in Warsaw – nothing of use to us.
Meanwhile our number has been called quicker than expected and Scotty is up at the counter. We’ve two journeys that we need to book tickets for; a local trip of Warsaw to Krakow and then our international trip of Krakow to Bratislava. We ask about the Krakow to Bratislava first, as this is our international trip and so justifies our use of the international booking office! It’s confusing with the dates (as it’s in fact our second trip in Poland, not first, so is six days away rather than just three) and Alice comes back from browsing to help out with this process. The adviser wants to sell the overnight train from Krakow to Bratislava, but as we’ve pre-booked hotels everywhere we want to travel during the day. My last (and only) experience on a sleeper train doesn’t endear me to the idea of changing our plans. The journey will take 8 hours which will be a full day, but at least it will get us there. The price isn’t bad, either, and we’re able to pay by card (Post Office commission free credit card is a life saver with all our travels!). As we get up to leave we ask if it is possible to book the local train here too, although we assume we’ll have to join the queues and flick our way through the Polish phrase book (borrowed from the P’s who bought it when they had a cleaner for a while who was Polish) to negotiate the ticket. Luckily we can put off attempts to speak the language a little longer as it turns out we can book the domestic train here too. The journey will be just three hours and will get us into Krakow around lunchtime. We begin to formulate a plan for the next stage of the trip (arrive, dump the bag at the hotel, walk into the historic centre for lunch) but we quickly move back to the present and the fact that we are in a new city and now ready to explore.
We leave the station and find our way to the main road by means of a printed Google map and street signs. The author of the In Your Pocket guide we have been reading is a huge fan of the street signs in Warsaw. Not only are they colour-coded for each district of the city, but many also list the building numbers and direction of numbering for the block you are in to help you avoid travelling miles in the wrong direction down the long streets.
When booking our trip, Warsaw was just one of the names that came up as a city we wanted to visit. It seemed to fit in with the train connections map, so it quickly became part of the itinerary. When we started speaking to other people, though, we realised that it wasn’t a ‘staple’ on the Europe circuit in the way that our other choices were. In fact, when talking to people about it we couldn’t really justify our choice beyond “we want to go” and “it sounds interesting” as we hadn’t really read much and so didn’t know much about the city at all. We then started hearing from people about the concrete jungle that the city had become after the Nazi occupation, and that there wasn’t anything to do there, or anything of interest. It was also proving difficult to find a map of the city – a quick visit to Standfords in Covent Garden had sourced pop-out maps for all our other cities (apart from Bratislava for which we found a guide book at the P’s), but nothing for Warsaw. We started to wonder if we’d made the wrong decision. Just a few days before arriving we began to think that if there’s nothing of interest we can at least find a cafe somewhere and catch up on the blog! But then the night before our trip, and then again on the train journey from Berlin, we started to look at a PDF we’d found on Warsaw and the random In Your Pocket PDF recommended in the Grauniad, and things started to change. Suddenly we were reading about a city with an amazing history that spanned its people and its buildings. We couldn’t wait to explore and see for ourselves.
So it was with this in mind that we set off from the station towards the hotel – would we see this city as grey, concrete and lifeless, or as the heart of a country torn apart by war and then rebuilt with passion?
We had decided to walk from the station to the hotel as although there were two trams that ran the route, we would only be taking them one stop (one block) and then would need to walk another block to the hotel. We set off and notice that the buildings are grey and mainly concrete, but also notice a lot of building activity and a lot of newer builds in glass with a dash of chrome. It’s clear from the glass and the neon signs on top of the buildings that a lot of international companies and brands are moving into the capital.
We find the hotel with ease (and without the wheel on the case falling off – bonus) and quickly remember why we were looking forward to this place – it had only been half a dozen Euros extra each night to upgrade from a standard room without breakfast to a business room with breakfast: bargain. The front desk offer us a further upgrade to a suite, but with just one case we don’t think we can justify separate rooms for sleeping and living! We’re also offered a list of newspapers to receive as part of the package and, although the Kindle is serving our news appetites well with the Kindle Guardian edition, we opt for a hard copy – it is free after all.
We are finally checked-in but before we go on our way the front desk asks us if we’d like a map of the city. We’d been hoping he’d ask this as we hadn’t visited the Tourist Information on the way to the hotel. The receptionist is excellent and goes way beyond simply handing us a map. He gives us a hard copy guide book of the city as well as a map, and then highlights the important areas to visit; the main touristic street of Nowy Swiat, the Old Town, the Palace of Culture (which he notes is a good way marker as you can see it from most places in town) and Park Lazienkowski, which he tells us is, in his opinion, the most beautiful area of Warsaw. He also points out the XXX which is a fountain in the public park, and tells us that we’re in luck as tonight they have a multimedia light show starting at 9.30pm This guy has been great!
Up in the room as notice three things. The first is that we definitely didn’t need the upgrade as the room is pretty big already; the second is that our window gives a direct view onto the Palace of Culture everyone has been talking about. Some call it an eye-sore, others the "elephant in frilly knickers” (?) but this ‘gift’ from Stalin and the people of the Soviet Union to the people of Warsaw is definitely iconic. It looks like the Empire State Building with Big Ben plonked on top in the gothic style of something you’d see in Ghostbusters. Third, we find that ‘business class’ rooms come with a Nespresso machine. Having never heard of these, let alone used one, we use the hotel WiFi to read the instructions but shy away from making a coffee as we can’t find any milk!
It’s late afternoon and we decide that we want to see this fountain light show, but don’t want to head off exploring too much too soon. It is, after all, raining. Having been sat on a train for the best part of 6 hours we decide to take advantage of the hotel gym for a bit and so head downstairs. It’s the first time Scott has run since tendonitis flared up in his ankle, but a gentle 20-minute run feels good and gives us both a chance to stretch our legs after the day’s travelling.
We shower and decide it’s time to head out. Knowing that we want to arrive in time for the multimedia fountain show at 9.30, we decide to walk first to the main tourist street to grab some food. We’ve read about a couple of microbreweries here in Warsaw, and decide to try one out. We arrive at BrowArmia to find a canopy over the street packed with people who got there before us. A man with a guitar is setting up a lot of sound equipment under some red lights, and we are shown to a table a row back from the street. It turns out that this is a good place to be, as it soon starts raining again and the people nearest the street get a good soaking.
The menu opens to a list of beers. It seems that either (a) they only brew on rotation and consequently only have certain brews in stock or (b) they’ve sold out of a lot of stuff. We settle on a Pils and a Marzenbrau – a German summer brew– and find each of them flavoursome and with superb body. It’s impossible to compare them to the microbrewery in Berlin as they’re different styles, but we’d happily drink lots more of both.
Having subjected our bodies to an onslaught of pork and potatoes over the last week, we each decide that it’s time for something different. Scott orders pasta with beef, and Alice gets salmon on wild rice. The food arrives incredibly fast and in enormous portions. We barely speak to each other as we work our way through the plate, and struggle to finish. Our plans of an ice cream en-route to the fountain show are most definitely scuppered.
Instead, our walk is marked by the appearance of old men selling umbrellas from tatty suitcases. They’re doing good business, though we opt to stick with our tried-and-tested combination of waterproof jacket and baseball cap. Fortunately the rain eases for a while and we’re able to look around at what is happening in the street, which includes a group of very angry looking people handing out newspapers outside a gazebo. On the side is printed ‘we demand…’ and, funnily enough, a list of demands. They basically amount to wanting a completely new investigation into the President’s plane that crashed last year. We wonder if the tape strung between lampposts to stop people walking into the road is connected to this. Either way, we’re impressed that a length of flimsy plastic tape keeps everyone on the pavement.
We walk past the political slogans and onward toward the Old Town. It’s a curious moniker, considering its history. The Old Town does indeed date back to the 12th and 13th centuries, and was enclosed by an impressive fortification. However, during the Warsaw Uprising (or which you’ll hear much more later) the Nazis systematically destroyed the city – including the Old Town – and reduced it to rubble. In the years that followed, the people of Warsaw cleared away the ruins and began raising funds to rebuild the city. From 1973 they did just that. Using photographs and paintings as their guide, in addition to some surviving architectural plans that had been stolen by the Nazis during the occupation and later retrieved, the entire Old Town was rebuilt just as it had been. They built on the original foundations and just a couple of years after being completed the entire area was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list as a place where historical architecture had most faithfully and accurately been reconstructed.
We, though, are unable to fully appreciate the extent of the achievement. In the rain the area doesn’t look quite as impressive as it would do in bright summer sunshine, and so we hope for better weather over the next couple of days. Instead we walk through the Old Town and trace the edge of a hill until we find a way towards the new fountain park. Hundreds of people are already streaming towards the same place, and we’re pleased that we gave ourselves enough time to make it there and grab a good spot. Milling around near the fountains, though, we realise that other groups of people are gathering on the grassy hill above the fountains and we decide to head there instead. Although not as close to the ‘action’ as we could have been, we gain a commanding view not only of the fountains but also the river and the ring-road. This doesn’t sound very exciting, but we are taken by surprise when a night-time road race with hundreds of runners begins to head past – that will be why the road was taped off earlier. It feels as if Warsaw is throwing all its culture at us at the same time and we can’t help feeling that it’s a shame that earlier in the week it failed to be named Europe’s City of Culture 2016.
At 9.30pm exactly all the lights in the park go out, and we hear the fountain begin spraying at an enormous rate. A video is projected onto the spray, followed by a laser writing an introduction to the show in both Polish and English. With bombastic orchestral music building to a swell the spray suddenly stops and the various jets of the fountain burst into life. They’re each lit from beneath with colour-changing lights (it’s amazing what you can do with LEDs these days) and are synchronised with the music. As well as spurting up to various heights, the jets of water also spin and rotate while changing colour. The description really doesn’t do the show justice – in total it lasted for half an hour but we could definitely have stayed much, much longer.
After the show we walk back up the hill with what appears to be the rest of the population of Warsaw. There must have been thousands of people watching the show, and they’re all now converging on the medieval streets of the Old Town and the New Town (a strange name, considering it was built in the 15th Century). Swept along with the crowds we find ourselves in the middle of a square where an artisan food market is being held. Eventually the crowds thin as we approach the old city walls, and while some people go to their cars parked in the alleyways and backstreets the majority catch the bus or tram. We, however, walk back to our hotel. The rain has started again, and after 30 minutes are pleased to be back in our room and able to hang up our clothes to dry!
Before heading to bed, though, we take advantage of the curious cloud-cover to photograph the Palace of Culture at night from our 10th floor window. It’s lit up with eerie blue and yellow lights, and the tip illuminates the clouds around it. Yep, it definitely looks like it could have a part in Ghostbusters.
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