Berlin, Warsaw and Kracow - part 2, Warsaw

 

I think I had trouble coping with Warsaw because we didn't buy tickets for the public transport and we should have done. The distances between the areas you want to see are deceptive and the walking is very uncomfortable. We stayed in a famous Communist-built hotel called the MDM. This is the view from our fifth floor room. Alas, the hotel has swapped its long-standing sign, MDM, for SAMSUNG and stands opposite a building called ZTE.

The hotel inside was modern and very smartly furnished, and the breakfast was wonderful. We could have had breakfast all day. The trouble was that the room was very very hot and I couldn't sleep at all, which made me feel increasingly unhappy. We went to see some old churches in the hotel district, and then we went to see the old town. The Old Town is a marvellous tourist attraction and is only about 20 years old. We were not fooled by the Old Town. It has been built on the footprint of the old town and it may look very similar, the churches and sculptures and quaint old inns are a marvellous piece of work, but we didn't buy it. We didn't visit the castle because it was quaintly new and again, we weren't fooled and felt it was like Epcot, the Disney version of Europe. We went to the new town which was also destroyed in the war and has been recently rebuilt. We enjoyed an ice cream. We were pleased to see where Marie Curie was born, or a reconstruction of the house where she was born.

Churches seem to have survived the war.

This is the square in the new town. Which is quite new.



A square in the "old town" - with carriage ride for the tourists.

As we walked around we did sort-of admire the Soviet style architecture and many sculptures showing the heroic workers.

The People's Palace - town hall with exhibition centre. It
is the most peculiar style.

Soviet -era building alongside modern capitalist buildings in Warsaw. We went to the national museum and admired some art, and found a great place to have coffee - the café even supplied double hammocks for lazing in!  but more popular with the Polish public was the army museum, and the poor Soviet-era Poles had spent a large proportion of their GDP on all this old rubbish.

There were loads of these machines standing around in rows.

The roads were very busy and there seemed to be a lot of work involved in finding underpasses where we could cross. We seemed to walk such a long way. Nothing was as cheap as we had been led to expect. Many Polish people had enough money to splash out in the few interesting venues and there were "butiks" with luxury goods in. I found as we walked around and looked at information boards about the history of Warsaw I just felt incredibly sad. Hitler wanted Poland as Lebensraum for his people. He despised the Poles. He always intended to kill them. After the Warsaw uprising in which only a handful of people, really, rose up against the Germans, Hitler ordered that Warsaw be razed to the ground and that all the people should be killed. The SS were sent in with orders to kill men, women and children. They killed 200,000 and destroyed the whole city. I feel as though no-one has recovered from the shock and the blow, except the very young people who possibly don't know about it or can't relate to it. They are happy dressing up and going out to be seen, and quite right, of course. It's time to get over it. But the current city of Warsaw doesn't work as a city. It hasn't been planned to the right scale. If you look at the top photograph again, and wonder what was that like before WWII, you can see the problem of Warsaw.

But finally, on our last evening in Warsaw, we found one thing that's lovely and has been well-restored. It's a royal park. It was a magical place to spend an evening and we even ate in a café /restaurant there. There were a lot of people there (Poles) enjoying the memorial to Chopin and the lakes and woodland walks.



Memorial to Chopin

 



Evening peace and calm.