Day 38 - A Fascinating Day in Warsaw

I will start today by singing the praises of my Hampton by Hilton hotel. After the long bus journey yesterday (so long, in fact, that it necessitated a McDonald’s near the bus station!), I was VERY happy to get to the hotel. For the bargain price of about £65 per night, including breakfast (details to follow!), I had a lovely Queen room. Now, I like to support the small hotels and the quirkier options, but this is a chain that clearly knows about how to make a good hotel room. The bed is super comfy, there are light switches and power sockets by the bed, and the shower doesn’t flood. Win!

And the breakfast….! I was a very happy human this morning with a breakfast buffet that had SO much to choose from. It was delicious - cereal, and fresh fruit, and waffles, and bacon…. Nom.

So, I was well fuelled for the day. My first stop was the Palace of Science and Culture, either a monstrosity or wonderful building, ‘given’ to Warsaw by the Soviets. According to my tour guide this afternoon, Warsaw was given a choice of three potential gifts from the Soviet Union, but it was made clear that Stalin really liked the Palace of Science and Culture, so there wasn’t much of a choice. And then after it was built, Warsaw was told that they had to pay for it anyway. Anyway, it is certainly a building that stands out. I had no issues finding it, but it may have taken me a bit longer to find the entrance….

Inside, I took the lift up to the 30th floor for views of the city. As you can see from the photo, there are quite a lot of architectural styles in the city!

I returned to ground level and slowly made the walk towards the Old Town, stopping at all kinds of statues, buildings, parks, and interesting things on the way. I include a few photos below - two of my favourite being the plaque celebrating Poland’s role in working with Bletchley Park to crack the Enigma code, and another being the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This had actually been part of a bigger palace after WWI, but that building was destroyed by the Germans after the Warsaw Uprising…. All except the three arches that you can still now see. No one actually knows why the Germans left the three arches, but they guess it was out of respect to the Tomb.

I made it down to the Old Town in time for a cup of tea. Most of the Old Town is actually new, having been destroyed in WWII after the Warsaw Uprising, but restored in the years afterwards. Here are just a few of my highlights of the new old town.

I was planning to visit the Castle, but it turns out that it is closed on Mondays, so instead went to the tourist information and found a walking tour to go on instead.

The walking tour was great, and included some excellent stories - my favourite being how the Nazis had taken a beloved statue of the beloved poet Adam Mickiewicz and melted it down during the war. In 1945, some Polish soldiers captured a statue of Hermann Goring (as well as finding the head of the Adam Mickiewicz statue), and they decided to Remake the Mickiewicz statue out of a melted down Goring statue. You have to commend the recycling.

I also enjoyed a story about how the Soviets built a new Ministry of Finance building in 1955 and launched a public vote to decide on a new street name for such an important building. This is why there is Winnie the Pooh street!

The extensive walking tour pleasingly finished only about a mile from my hotel, so I headed back that way, obviously via a cafe for another cup of tea, and had an hour to rest my feet before heading back out for dinner.

I asked the hotel receptionist for any recommendations, and she recommended this small Polish restaurant nearby. It was a cracking recommendation as I am typing this from the Radio Cafe Restaurant, with a tummy full of yummy food. This is my cherry pierogi pudding!

Even cooler, this restaurant is run by ‘Stash’ Pruszynski, who escaped Poland in the 1950s and worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich. This restaurant is now a Radio Free Europe club, where people involved with the station meet up.

I have found my day in Warsaw to be fascinating, and there is so much that I have not seen or done. I was hoping to go to the Warsaw Uprising museum, for example, but it was a bit too far out of the way. I do feel as though I have got a flavour of the city though, and it is certainly somewhere I would come back to.