First impressions of Warsaw

Poland Days 13-14. It wasn’t love at first sight but after a few walking missions, Poland’s capital city started to grow on me.
I’m visiting Warsaw three times; book-ends to my side trips to Torun and Kiev. It’s a bit mucky and not an ideal approach to get to know a city but I’m working around the constraints of my Chernobyl tour dates and it does provide the benefit of staying in different parts of the city. This first and last visits I’m staying near the main train and bus station; in the middle I’m in the old town.
Here the street signs are blue which means this is south / south-central Warsaw.

Just around the corner from the hotel
This remnant was in the courtyard of an apartment building – which is locked. Two ladies happened to be exiting who had managed to get in to have a look and, showing me their photos, expressed disappointment about the relatively tiny bit of wall they found. Tempted to somehow see it myself, I nevertheless carried on with my mission for today.
I soon come across this: one of 21 boundary markers installed around the city, indicating the actual width of the walls.
A little further on I arrived at the Warsaw Rising Museum, situated in a renovated power station building on the ghetto border. What I didn’t realise was that being Sunday, tickets are free… which was good in the sense that it cost me nothing; bad in the sense that there were SOMANYPEOPLE. Gah! I saw what I could but wasn’t really inclined to linger. Looks like an amazing museum, dimly lit though with a funny bitsy layout which was difficult to know where you were going especially with SOMANYPEOPLE.

Emblem of the Polish resistance during the Uprising

Memorial wall outside the museum
I took the scenic route back to the hotel – which isn’t to say it’s a scenic part of Warsaw. There’s a lot of new high rise around my hotel district but my wanderings took me past run down areas with graffiti and plenty of very drab and worn apartment buildings, all dating from the same era. I realised I shouldn’t at all be surprised about that given the rebuild post-WW2 under a communist regime.

All that remains of a prison used by the Gestapo which saw about 100,000 people held captive. It was destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising

A long strip of sunflowers appeared down the middle of one of the main arterials

I went searching for pre-WW2 buildings and was almost too late. A street near my hotel used to have red brick facades that made it through the war, albeit with the stucco blown off and shrapnel holes visible. Only one of those buildings is now left and it was under wraps so I guess it’s on the way out – so this little man will be too

There are plenty of big empty spaces like this; I wonder how much is a legacy of what occurred between 1940-45
There was an unexpected bonus find along the way.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

It is located under the arcades of what was left of the Saski Palace after the Germans blew it up. Amazingly, the Tomb of the Unknown Solider survived

There are several black benches with a button that if you press ‘play’ broadcasts a short piece from Chopin! (He studied music in Warsaw.)


Freaky!

The train to Torun took almost three hours. The main station here is on the other side of the Vistula to the main part of the city and I opted to make the half hour walk. I’m staying in the old town behind the city wall in a small hotel down one of the many small streets. Initially I thought I must be near a train track but later realised it was cars driving along the cobblestone road below my window. Blonde.

Hello Toruń!
Don’t know how you do what you do but all the pics are either fantastic or very depressing. Interesting city but the killing of the Jews is a terrible part of history.
I’ve thought about how to explain my interest in going to these sites. The subjects and back story are heavy but they’re not heavy on me. I have a burning curiosity to be able to see and feel these places and being there makes me reflective and occasionally aghast at the scale of what happened and the horrific loss of life – but not sad. Must just be how I’m wired.