Wandering all over Warsaw

We caught the ten past seven Lux Express bus from Vilnius to Warsaw. I'm not sure why it is called Lux, there's nothing luxurious about it. There's a toilet and hot beverages. That's it. No food cart or food is included. For those who didn't plan ahead, they were screwed. Luckily, we were prepared as I played tuckshop lady, making sandwiches on the bus. Maybe I could get a second job in a tuckshop.

The almost eight hour journey took us through the countryside of Lithuania via Kaunas and across the Lithuanian-Polish border near Podwojponie in Poland. As we crossed the burger, border security flagged down our bus and jumped on board to check passports and visas. Usually we get interrogated to the nth degree: where are your going? Where are you staying? How long will you be here? Do you have a return ticket. But on this occasion, the border security officer took a look at our passports, eyeballed us and went on their way. The guy in front of us got a bit of a grilling: do you have a visa? I'm not sure where he was from, but the guy sitting diagonally across from us was Ukrainian and seemed to have a permanent residency card for Poland. They didn't grill him as much.

We arrived in Warsaw and ordered a Bolt car to take us to our hotel. When we checked in, I realised that the previously axed Lost World production had commissioned another reunion episode. This time it wasn't a fire drill but a real fire. I’d left my reading glasses on the bus. Somehow in the rush to get off the bus I’d either left them in the seat pocket or they fell out of my bag. Oh well, an excuse to buy another pair.

We only had two nights in Warsaw and we had to cover a lot of ground in that time. Warsaw is the capital and the largest city in east-central Poland, with a metropolitan population of around 3.1 million. The city is situated along the not-so-clean Vistula river. After checking into our hotel, we set out to explore the Old Town or Old Warsaw as it is historically known.

Unfortunately during World War II, 85 per cent of the city was destroyed by German bombing. The German Luftwaffe specially targeted residential and historic landmarks, which meant the majority of the Old Town did not survive. After the siege of Warsaw, some of the buildings in the Old Town were rebuilt but were again destroyed by the German Army in 1944. Following the end of the war, there was an effort to reconstruct them using the original bricks that survived and based on designs and drawings from the past; however, some of the reconstruction didn’t follow the original plans, and there was some attempts to improve the original design. Nonetheless, the end result is a beautiful reconstruction of architecture from the thirteenth to twentieth centuries, and recognised in 1980 by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

The following day, we headed to Centrum, a newer part of the city to wander around. Amongst some of the newer skyscrapers stands the 237-metre Palace of Culture and Science, which was gifted to Poland by the Soviet Union in 1955 and modelled on the Empire State building in New York. It's still the second largest building in Poland.

Before we ended our time in Warsaw, we had one more opportunity to taste the cuisine on offer. We had had Azerbaijani food in Estonia, now we had tried vegan Syrian food in Warsaw, and ended it with a Thai feast at a Vietnamese-Thai restaurant. The stern and rather abrupt Vietnamese woman softened when we said a Cảm ơn (thanks). One of the previous Polish patrons ended up walking out the restaurant, seemingly because she was so abrupt. Our limited Vietnamese came in handy. There was no point in giving her a dzień dobry (hi) or a dziękuję (thanks).

After more than 27,000 steps in a day, it was time to retire to our hotel. The soles of our shoes probably need retreading at this point before heading to our next destination.

Next destination: Berlin.

Polish: Dzień dobry (Hi), Dziękuję (Thank you pronounced Djen-kuu-yea).Read more