Poland Trip: Day 1

Not long after returning home, one of my sisters announced that she would make a weekend trip to the UK, while the other started spinning plans for a weekend out and about in Prague. I decided, therefore, to go on a trip of my own. My choice fell on Poland, as I have seen very little of the country outside of Krakow.

Now, the geography of Poland seems perfectly suited for a trip from Prague to Warsaw via Wrocław and Łódź, as one could almost draw a straight line between the four cities. First impressions, however, are often misleading, and I found that taking a train from Prague even just to Wrocław would take an absurdly long time. Thus, I changed my plans from travelling by train to travelling by plane, and I swapped out Wrocław and Łódź for Gdańsk.

I flew into Warsaw during a thunderstorm, but the skies were not as turbulent as I had expected. The pilot manoeuvred his way through the clouds by making what seemed a very abrupt dive, but perhaps the angle just seemed quite extreme due to the small size of the aircraft. We touched down before two o’clock and it took the rest of the day for the storm to clear up. Indeed, it was raining as I waited and got off the bus from the airport, and it continued to drizzle for a long time after that.

As the ticket machine at the platform was broken, I bought my ticket on the bus itself. It took a while for me to get the hang of the system and I managed to launch my debit card across the bus floor before I finally made a payment. My success was fortuitous: not long before I left the bus, it was boarded by two inspectors. Using a pincer strategy, they worked their way to the centre of the bus from either entrance, but I arrived at my stop before they got to me. I am still not sure, therefore, whether I bought the right ticket.

Arriving by the main train station, I was assaulted by a whole range of sights that I can only describe politely as stereotypical. I climbed out of sweat-drenched bus and immediately felt the rain falling from skies of an Iron-Curtain grey. Before my eyes stood the Palace of Culture and Science, a heavily Stalinist building reminiscent of Moscow State University, and walking under it were middle-aged men clad in sandals, shorts, and button-down shirts. Two schoolboys zoomed past me on a scooter, one of them with a massive and probably permanent tattoo of a football wearing a crown.

I spent my first hour in Warsaw around the palace, taking the elevator to the observatory after briefly getting lost in its entrails. It is said that spending one day in every room of the building would take nine years. The weather was still not ideal, so the Old Town lacked colour from afar. What I did see very clearly, though, were the socialist-era towers surrounding the palace, one with a Coca-Cola sign on top and another advertising McDonald’s. It was a paradoxical sight.

As planned, I met my friend Eli near the palace at four o’clock, and the programme for the rest of the day unfurled under her direction. We strolled down the street for some time and stopped by the Church of the Holiest Saviour before sitting down at a local café. Eli insisted that I try a krówka – a hard, brown and sticky sweet that tastes a lot like condensed milk. We also had nettle cake.

Eli’s original plan had been to show me around Łazienki Park, but the weather continued its unfriendly course and forced us into the comfort of the town centre. We walked along the street Krakowskie Przedmieście, which is an offshoot of Nowy Świat, joining the latter at the statue of Nicolas Copernicus. Further down the road we walked past multiple churches, which were either closed or in the middle of service. Finding the main door shut at the Church of the Visitants, we wandered deep into the compound through a side entrance and ended up in what seemed to be the church’s residential quarters.

The highlight of our day, however, was when – strolling towards the presidential palace – we were passed by several vans with tinted windows accompanied by police cars. Further down the road, we happened upon an Asian camera crew and another two emerged close by. They were recording news reports while a delegation of smartly dressed men was ushered into the palace, protected by multiple layers of policemen and soldiers. Thanks to our eavesdropping, we realised that the delegation was from Korea, and a quick Google search found that the delegation comprised the South Korean president among others.

From there, we walked into the old town and reached as far north as the Barbican, where Eli announced she hated everything north of that part of town and had us return. Satisfied by our strolling through the old streets, we eventually changed our course southward again, stopping by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier before having dinner in the more modern and less touristy part of town.