Day 1 - Warsaw, Poland 🇵🇱

And the journey begins!
We flew to Warsaw on Saturday 4/4 lunchtime. We had packed our sandwiches and all sorts of snacks cause we arrived on their Easter weekend - thus didn’t know what we would find open and our food is very important to us!
The flight was very pleasant even though I had a bit of a headache in the beginning, but it soon went away. As soon as we got to the airport we walked out and there was a huge line of “Bolt” taxis - Bolt is an Estonian company which is super famous here (and around Europe) for their online services of taxis. You just book where you want to go from your phone and you pick whichever taxi you want and just show a code to the driver. No directions or language barriers. Very easy!
Checked into our hotel, and immediately went out for our walk around the city. There weren’t many people out in the beginning. We also noticed black flags outside of a church symbolising mourning, grief, and the spiritual darkness following the crucifixion of Jesus Christ - tomorrow it’s going to be changed to white and gold. While we were walking we noticed some signs on the ground that said “Ghetto wall 1940-1943” and it used to be a wall that the German occupation authorities, had cut off the rest of the city on November 16, 1940. A sign near there wrote: “The ghetto area, surrounded by a wall, was initially 307 hectares (759 acres); with time, it was reduced.
Starting in January 1942, it was divided in two parts called the large and small ghettos. Approximately 360,000 Warsaw Jews and 90,000 from other towns were herded into the ghetto. Nearly 100,000 died of hunger. During the. summer of 1942, the Germans deported and murdered close to 300,000 people in the gas chambers of Treblinka. On April 19, 1943, an uprising broke out in the ghetto. Until mid-May, fighters and civilians perished in combat or in the systematically burned ghetto buildings. The remaining population was murdered by Germans in November 1943 in the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps. Only a few survived. To the memory of those who suffered, fought and perished.”
When we walked into the old town we noticed more people out and a few church services for Holy Saturday. It started getting a bit cold so I gave Lampros my cardigan (luckily for him it was a sweet habit one!) and just wore my jacket which was more than fine. We stopped and had a beer (very fruity local bear) Lampros of course had a non alcohol one (!) and then headed back to our room cause we were getting very tired. Tomorrow we’re spending the day in Warsaw and have a late night bus to Vilnius!!もっと詳しく