By Saturday, after eight days on the go, I was kind of tired. My hotel was too hot, I’d glimpsed four cities over the last week and today I was finally going to see Taylor Swift, after possessing an Eras tour ticket for nearly thirteen months. I could have quite happily stayed home. But I was in Warsaw! I had to see something of Warsaw! I would probably be even more tired tomorrow after my late night and I’d be flying home on Monday.
So I got up, got dressed – in the long blue t-shirt I bought in Łódź yesterday over the cycling shorts I was wearing to the tour tonight, and discovered that a long pale blue t-shirt looks a lot like a hospital gown. After some experimenting, I discovered that I could tuck it into the shorts and front and back and let it hang down and fold under and that didn’t look too ridiculous. In fact, I also discovered that I could then untuck it to turn it into a suitably modest longer-than-knee-length dress for churches where Jesus disapproves of legs.
Anyway. I figured out my tram, walked up to the main road and got on the tram. It takes about twenty minutes to reach the city centre and it passes directly by the National Stadium. Eras merch… I did want to get a t-shirt. Do I stop now? While it’s quiet? And then I’ve got to carry it around all day. Or do I come back later and queue in the heat of the afternoon? I decided to jump off there and then and do my shopping. Nice to know what an easy tram ride it is to the stadium. That’s my recce done entirely by accident. So I bought my t-shirt, returned to the tram stop and continued my journey.
The trouble was that I couldn’t quite figure out where the centre of Warsaw actually is, or whether it has one and I certainly couldn’t figure out how to get there. I jumped off somewhere that looked reasonably central and decided to walk. This was on the edge of the New Town. Normally there are buses and trams running up here but they’re digging the whole thing up so you can’t get near it. I strolled. I popped into a couple of souvenir shops in the hope of finding a badge and instead found that every single one of them was playing Taylor Swift. I don’t think Warsaw officially adopted any “this week we’re called Swiftville”-type nonsense but you’d have to be both blind and deaf to not realise that’s what effectively happened. There’s a giant Eras mural on the side of an apartment block on the opposite side of the river to the stadium, there’s a big friendship bracelet billboard on the roundabout just north of it, every other person is a Swiftie, either in the t-shirt or wearing an armful of friendship bracelets. As the capital, I figured Warsaw was likely to be busier than any of the cities I’d visited on my way here but it’s impossible to tell whether it’s actually busier or if it’s just that Swifties have descended en masse for the weekend. My Rangers asked “Which were you, t-shirt or bracelets?” and I was bracelets. Just the one, for now. I’d carried it all the way to Łódź and then put it on on Friday since that was the day I was heading for Warsaw. It says Eras Warsaw in colourful letters and then it has beads in each album colour going up each side and meeting on the knot.
I think I’d got off the tram at the National Museum and walked north up Nowy Świat, New World Street, to eventually pop out at the Staszic Palace and the Copernicus statue. Poland has a few people it’s particularly proud of and Copernicus is one of them. Pope John Paul II is another. In fact, just a few steps up the road from the statue, I popped into Holy Cross Church to find him emerging out of the wall. The Church isn’t really to my taste but I enjoyed trying out my long skirt/short skirt theory and cooling off for a minute. A bit further down the road I came across a bagpipe band which I quite enjoyed but something about their banners made me dubious and a moment’s googling revealed that they’re a far-right Catholic organisation and so I moved on.
Eventually I came to Plac Zamkowy, which I think is Castle Square and this is really the beginning of the Old Town. Of course, none of it is actually old. I knew Poland had been decimated during the war but I hadn’t realised how bad it was, especially in Warsaw. Warsaw was basically flattened. As it happened, this weekend marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, when Warsaw tried to fight back against their Nazi occupiers. They were ultimately unsuccessful and Hitler, furious at Warsaw for trying it, ordered Warsaw razed to the ground, as the petty revenge I might expect from a five-year-old. It was a really weird thing because that was also the week that far right “protestors”, aka violent thuggish rioters, stomped around the UK, smashing and burning just for the fun of it. To contrast Poland’s anti-far-right celebrations with what was going on back home was somewhere between surreal and impossible.
So the Old Town is all under 80 years old, because it was all destroyed in the 1940s and has been rebuilt since then, using old paintings and photos and the occasional original blueprint as references to recreate the originals as closely as possible. You’d certainly never know that this is all younger than my grandmother and probably not far off the same age as my dad. From the Royal Castle, the streets narrow and you wind your way to the traditional decorative old market square. All of this area was chaotically busy. Was it the sun? Was it the fact that it’s Saturday? Is it the influx of Swifties? Is it a bit of each of them? I stepped out of the chaos and into the Archcathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist, another brick Gothic church. I pretty much knew what to expect by now. White walls and ceiling, slender brick pillars and vaults, nice stained glass. But oh, this glass was mindblowing. What did the church look like? Eh, probably white and brick. But the glass! The windows were huge, especially considering I thought all the buildings were conjoined and that there couldn’t actually be any side windows, and they were made up of thousands of colourful squares. No large areas of glass here, these were basically mosaics. Dozens of them, mostly with three layers of figures – saints, kings and angels mostly, but there were figures that were much more modern – three men in patchwork trousers, tail coats and white magistrate-style wigs, plus some that looked a lot more 20th-century. Their names are actually written in curly lead letters underneath them but I can’t read them, only that the man in the green patchwork suit appears to be Wladyslav and from what I can make out of the surname, I think is Władysław Sikorski, Polish Prime Minster in the early 1920s and PM in exile during WWII. I think the one on the left is Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Polish war poet, and the last one, with a dog collar, is probably Władysław Korniłowicz, a Catholic priest who was later beatified. So yes, confirmed, there are modern figures in there as well as presumably Bible ones.
I was spellbound by these windows. I’d never seen anything like them. I was tempted to send me boss there and then a text saying I was resigning with immediate effect to become a stained glass artist and that he could see my work in Westminster Abbey next time they needed new windows. As it was, I came home and did a stained glass workshop three weeks later, producing an A4 panel that was not quite as ornate. Not bad for a first attempt. You’ll see, I’ll be making windows one day, even if it’s only for my own house.
Onwards to the square! I found something interesting in this square – a little lady dressed up as a Victorian, or maybe Edwardian, lady with an old-fashioned bellows camera who posed you in front of the fountain, took your photo, placed her camera on her little table and it spat out a fake newspaper front page featuring your photo right in the middle. I have no idea how this contraption works but you bet I went and had my photo taken. Then I pranced off with my newspaper and sent a picture of it to my mum. She believed I’d somehow ended up in the local paper – maybe they were talking about the influx of Swifties? – and sent it to her friends, going “not sure how this happened, but my daughter seems to be in the newspaper”. My sister had a little more sense – as I’d done, she ran it through Google Translate and discovered that it’s a pretend newspaper. Actually, I stood accused of thievery and maybe even of being part of a network of professional thieves. It’s a good picture, though.
Then I ended up at the Barbican, which is the remains of a 16th century defensive wall – or rather, the reconstruction of the remains of the wall. I walked along this bit of wall, sat and looked at the view and then decided I was too hot and too tired to see any more of Warsaw. I needed to go home, have some food, have a nap and then get dressed and go out.
But first I had to figure out how to get back. I’d walked a good few kilometres from the tram stop by now. Actually, I’d walked about three, but that would make a return journey of 6km, which is more than enough for someone who didn’t desperately want to go out in the first place. I meandered up the street, past some kind of war memorial surrounded by soldiers who’d clearly just in the last couple of minutes finished some kind of ceremony (this turned out to the Warsaw Uprising Memorial, during the weekend of its 80th anniversary!) and up the road again to finally pop out at my first metro station, Ratusz Arsenal. This was all pretty easy, except that I had to take out my ticket and feed it through the machine, something I hadn’t had to do in Berlin, which made it feel like a huge and tedious effort. The trains were large and spacious and had plenty of seats and I went two stops to Centrum, which was both right underneath the Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw’s unwanted gift of a skyscraper from Stalin, and at a complicated junction where I could take the tram I’d been on this morning.
And so I sailed home.
The Eras tour started just after 7, with Paramore on just after 6, so I wanted to be there in plenty of time. I knew it would take time to queue and get through security and find my way around, so I suspect I was out of the hotel just after 4. I’d made a sequin t-shirt dress, inspired by the one Taylor wears for Anti-Hero, except mine had more of a boat neckline than a proper rounded elasticated t-shirt neckline. It also didn’t sparkle as much as I thought it would and because the sequins were scratchy and the fabric entirely transparent, I’d lined it – with brushed cotton. Oh, I enjoyed the thing while parading around the garden but to go out in public in Warsaw in it… first, I felt stupid being dressed up in sequins, and second it was really bulky. That dress is supposed to be light and flowy and it felt a bit like wearing a winter coat. And it scratched! I’d also made a matching bag, because you’re only allowed to take an A4-size bag into the stadium and I figured I’d maximise that by literally making it A4. I had my passport, because you need ID and your driving licence apparently isn’t good enough. I had my ticket. I had my earplugs. My phone, my portable charger, some bracelets to swap and my precious ticket. I was glad to be joined by other Eras-goers at the tram stop – admittedly, none of them in bulky home-made sequin dresses but nonetheless obviously dressed up for Taylor Swift.
The tram dropped us off where it had this morning, somewhere around the south-east corner of the stadium. My gate was at the north-west and it took forever walk halfway round the perimeter of the stadium. The queue for gate 5 went a quarter of the way around the stadium and I began to realise that it was impossible to arrive early enough. Then there was a queue at my gate for “clearing” – I had no idea what this was and whether I should be in it but I took a chance on going straight to the entrance gate.
Getting in took no time. None of the queues were longer than a couple of minutes. There was the queue to show your ticket to be allowed in, there was the queue for security, the queue for bag check and then the queue for scanning your ticket to get into the structure itself. All done in no time at all. I’d been sort of expecting to stand there for long enough to strike up conversation with the people in front and behind and swap bracelets while waiting but there was none of that. Straight through!
I paused to get a drink. I’d smuggled a bottle top in because you’re generally not allowed to close your bottles but here the EU attached-lids nonsense played to my advantage. It was good to have a bottle of Fanta that I could drink throughout the entire show and not have to worry about spilling! I got to my seat, about two-thirds of the way up and about level with the main stage. Well, that wasn’t so bad. I could see everything! Actually, I gradually came to realise I couldn’t see the graphics on the main screen behind the main stage. There were smaller screens on the side and on the ceiling but they really only showed the feed from the cameras following Taylor around the stage and not the graphics that go with it all. And for all the great view, once Paramore came out, I realised that yes, I could see everything but “everything” was the size of ants.
If I’d had my camera with the good zoom, I think I’d have enjoyed it more. My brain would have thought it could actually see everything even though it can’t. But cameras weren’t allowed in, only phones. Not even little pocket-sized cameras that absolutely don’t have a 30x optical zoom. I wish I’d sneaked it in. I reckon I could have got away with it. I definitely saw someone with a small (albeit zoom-less) digital camera. The other thing was that I wore earplugs. I don’t exactly regret this decision. This show is loud, mostly because the audience scream all the way through it. I enjoyed taking the earplugs out afterwards to discover my ears weren’t ringing and my hearing wasn’t damaged. They cut out the worst of the crowd noise while leaving the actual music perfectly audible. But they also mean that my own voice is deafening. If I sang, I had no idea how loud I was actually singing, I couldn’t judge my own pitch and I couldn’t hear Taylor. So I didn’t sing. I mimed a lot and I absolutely joined in when “the crowd was shouting more!” but I didn’t sing otherwise. I assume my neighbours assumed I didn’t know any of the words. I did, I just didn’t want to drown out the actual music in my own ears.
As an aside, I could never be Taylor Swift. Apart from the obvious, I’d be standing on that stage, in that glittering bodysuit, looking at my imaginary watch and going “I’m not starting until you’re all quiet and if you scream, I’m going home”. Speaking of the glittering bodysuit, I’d spent part of the afternoon looking at the outfits for each era for the last few nights of the tour and putting together a list of predictions for the outfits I’d get – a breathtakingly accurate list, I must say. I got the Speak Now dress wrong (I put down the purple one with layers and got the original sequinned silver one) and I put the dark purple Anti-Hero dress and got the light purple one. Everything else correct, right down to purple skirt and pink top for 1989 – that’s the unpredictable wildcard but I figured we hadn’t seen either of them in quite a while and there they were!
Getting home afterwards was fun. I knew the local tram stops would be closed because I’d spotted that on my ticket when I printed it off. Well, there were tram stops further out or there was the metro or maybe there was a bus or if the worst came to the worst, I could walk. It would be an hour on a fairly straight fairly major road. I didn’t want to do that – not because of the distance but obviously walking for an hour late at night in a strange city is a last resort. When the show finished and 65,000 people poured out, I realised why there were no trams. The road was just flooded with people in sequins! How Taylor got back to her hotel, I have no idea (the Marriot, according to someone I strolled past on the street earlier – I did not go there to check!). I was carried along with the deluge, past the junction and at last onto the road that I might be walking up. Actually, walking didn’t look like such a bad idea. I should have guessed I wouldn’t be alone, given how many thousands of people were there. And then, a couple of hundred metres away, there was the first stop on the truncated tram line. I was heading out of town rather than into, so we were a smaller crowd anyway, small enough that we could all pile fairly comfortably onto the tram. One more stop up and half of us got off and that meant I had a seat, and ten minutes later, I was walking into my hotel.
My arms and legs were covered in scratches from the sequin dress and bag. First job, get all that off. Second, find that scrap of paper with the costume predictions on and see how accurate it was. Third, drink half the pineapple juice. Fourth, get annoyed at the speed of the wifi while you attempt to tell Instagram how accurate you were (the wifi just didn’t work 90% of the time right up on the 10th floor and it was irrationally annoying!). And fifth, go to bed.
And so that was Saturday in Warsaw and I’d done the thing that this whole adventure had revolved around!