Poland - Warsaw

The ten hour train trip into Poland wasn’t actually too bad, just really damn boring. Amanda asked if she could read my blog, which I’d just finished writing, and then it somehow turned into her reading it out loud to the other six of us. What I write is more personal than what I would normally say out loud. I’m totally fine with knowing that everybody’s going to read it, but having it read aloud in front of me was quite a strange feeling. I was trying to hide behind Steve.

We got to our hotel at something like 930pm, and the seven of us had decided while we were still on the train to go to the Hard Rock Café and have a proper dinner. While we were en route to the restaurant it started absolutely pouring. I could hardly see out of the car. And there was sheet lightening all around the sky, all evening, but no thunder. It was Ian and Julie’s last night with us, so I’m really glad we went out and did something, but as soon as we finished eating all we wanted to do was go home and fall into bed. Adrian just about had one foot in a taxi by the time we finished paying the bill.

We had a 9am or 930am orientation walk the next day, so Pancakes and Julie came downstairs and checked out at the same time, so we could all say goodbye. It was sad!! Kat cried. Then Julie cried. It’s amazing how quickly you form relationships with people when you travel together, we’d all only known each other for 2 weeks.

Warsaw was so hot!! We walked from the hotel into the old town, and on the way we saw a bear.

Adrian does an excellent impression.  Rawr...

 

He did have a friend in there with him, but the friend was far brighter than Fluffy here, and was off under the trees having a snooze.  They’re part of the zoo, but their enclosure is outside the entrance, alongside the public footpath.  We found out that Adrian does a very funny impression of a bear when he asked a Polish taxi driver if he could feed the bear a rabbit.  He was getting a bit obsessive about feeding the bear a rabbit.

Orientation walks are good because we stop at the major churches, castles, and town squares, so we don’t have to feel bad if we don’t go back to them.  Churches do tend to all look the same to me after a while.   The old town  in Warsaw was very pretty though.

The first photo shows what was left of the square (shown in the second and fourth photos) after WWII.

It was basically rubble, and they've rebuilt it to look the same as it did before the war. 

The third photo is of the old town wall.

After the orientation walk, I went to the Gestapo museum with Amanda, Steve, Adrian, and Kat, which was along the same lines as the KGB building in Vilnius but not quite as graphic. When you walk in the front door, there’s a film playing. We all know how I felt about the last one, so I was a bit nervous. The only visual was portraits of people who’d been victimised in that building, with a voiceover about what had happened. The thing I remember most clearly is that when the war was over and the building was vacated, there was 5,500 kilos of human ash in there. After the film finished, we walked along the corridor and had a look in the cells. A couple of them had been preserved exactly the way they’d been at the end of the war, with bullet holes in the wall opposite the door.

We ended up spending the afternoon shopping. All the women in Warsaw were really beautifully dressed, so I was feeling pretty mangey in my travel clothes and I was dying for something pretty to wear. I got a new dress, and I was really hoping for high heels but couldn’t find any that I liked enough to buy. I’ve failed as a woman.

Kat had booked a single room for that night (before she met me, obviously), so I had a great big twin room to myself. Excellent. Although we were only home for a couple of hours before we met up again to go out for the evening.

It was kind of a strange night all round. I’m not quite sure how else to sum it up. Amanda and Steve had done some homework for us and found out where we should go, so we got a taxi to the Hard Rock Café and walked from there. The idea was that there was plenty in the area, but in the end we walked for something like half an hour before we found a bar. It was called “Players”, as in football, and there was no music and almost nobody there. We decided that since there was nothing else in sight that looked like a bar, we might as well have a drink and see if we could figure out where we should go from there, so we sat outside and watched which direction the girls in short skirts and high heels were walking. Then we got up and walked in the opposite direction. That wasn’t really intentional. Amanda wanted to go to a place called Organza, which was meant to be the best place in town, so we were trying to head for that.

We ended up standing on a street corner, and we could see one place which was called “Bollywood”. So we figured we’d give it a thrash, since we couldn’t seem to pin down anything else. It was certainly very interesting. There were a lot of tables of Indian men. There were five guys at the next table, and they took it in shifts staring at us for most of the time we were there. There were a few other women there, but not a huge number, and quite a high proportion of them appeared to be hookers. There was a DJ too, who was playing Indian music, which was a lot of fun. He wasn’t so good at merging from one song to another though, every now and then there’d be two different rhythms going on at the same time. All part of the fun. We had a couple of drinks and the others shared a shisha, and we played with Adrian’s new camera, and Kat and Amanda even braved up and had a dance. The guys at the next table were absolutely agape.

Mum:  He's got a girlfriend.

I had to have this photo in here because it's just so cute.

The girls

When we left, we walked outside and hailed a taxi, and asked to go to Organza. The driver thought we were taking the piss because it was literally right around the corner. We must’ve walked right past it. He took us to a club that he recommended, the Opera Club. They let us straight in, even though they’d turned away the group that were right in front of us, and as soon as we got in the door we knew we were in the right place. It was underground, through these red brick tunnels with arched ceilings and wooden floors, and then you walk into a bigger room with a bar, a DJ, and a dance floor. It was, without any exaggeration, the best club I’ve been to. Everyone was there to dance, not to get wasted, the DJ was amazing, and there was a great atmosphere. Even the bar staff were having a great time. We got there a little after midnight and left at 3am, and Kat and I danced for most of the night. We got Adrian out on the dance floor when Kat went to the bar, and he was a bit of a hit – I got totally elbowed out, every tall girl in the room gravitated toward him (and there were plenty of tall girls there), and I found myself right at the edge of the dance floor. However, it didn’t last long. We need to work on his dance moves.

Every time we go to have a group photo, Steve stands right in front of me.

The hallway into the club, featuring Kat.

The next day, to be honest, Kat and I didn’t really get moving until midday. We wandered into town, past the rather naked lady who was sunbathing in the park, Kat went to the post office, we had some lunch, Kat went to sleep at the table, we wandered over to the university library and had a look at the rooftop garden and our second view of naked sunbathing girls for the day, and then we went home again. Hard day. We’d planned to go out for a meal, but the other three had done a tour during the day and been shown a whole lot of great bars, a block away from our hotel, so it was decided we needed to go out again. We had some new people joining our tour that day, so we invited two of them to come with us. Meet Cameron (28) and Marsha (22), mates who are travelling together, who are both Aussies. Dammit! We now have 6 Aussies and me.

We went to three bars along this one street, and by ourselves we would never have found any of them. The last one was around the back of a big industrial looking building, where we sat outside in the courtyard between the buildings and watched Kat and Steve compete at badminton, until someone lost the shuttlecock.  There was also some hula hoop action from Kat and Adrian, and a group of boys who were break dancing.  Not what we expected to find in the middle of Warsaw. Still, it was a much quieter night than the one before. For most of us anyway, I believe Adrian ended up at the strip club and only got back this morning in time to pick up his backpack before we had to meet at 810am to get on the train to Krakow!