It is now October and this journey started in July and I’m still writing about it! Twice a week blogs mean eleven-day trips take a while, I guess. But it’s my last full day! It’s the day after I finally went to the Eras tour and I started it late and lazy with a quest to find a nearby Żabka open on a Sunday morning so I could have fresh bread and butter for breakfast. Then off I went into Warsaw.
I’d had a glimpse of Poland’s capital the day before, when I was too tired and hot to really care. Now I had to do it again, but better. I started with a tram and metro journey back to Ratusz Arsenal and walked down Długa to the Warsaw Uprising Monument, which no longer had a military ceremony happening on it. I’d done a bit of reading overnight and now had a better idea what the Warsaw Uprising was and what the consequences were. I put all this in the previous post but it’s worth repeating: after years of Nazi occupation, the Uprising was Poland’s attempt to overthrow the Nazis. Yes, ultimately unsuccessful and the result was that Hitler had the city destroyed but 80 years later, they’re still celebrating the attempt whereas back in the UK, that very week, the far right was attempting an uprising of their own. I know which one I’m on the side of. From then on I looked at Warsaw very differently, at this city rebuilt from the ground up, literally, in my grandparents’ lifetime after the entire city was destroyed. As someone who dropped history as a school subject as early as possible, it never ceases to amaze me how what I know about the war can just continue to get worse. There are TikToks going round portraying Hitler fairly sympathetically – this is why you should travel, to teach you, to show you, how bad it was.
It feels disingenuous to promptly skip off to the Old Market Square to wonder if it’ll be less busy now the Eras tour has departed the city, how I scanned the crowds for Taylor Swift t-shirts and bracelets and concluded the Swifties hadn’t moved out quite yet. There was a bit of a walk between the monument and the square but the blog doesn’t get that walking distance and space. I took a selfie with the Warsaw Mermaid (found out what that was about last night too!) and then, because it was hot, pumped some cold water over my sandalled feet. Poland tends to have regular public drinking water supplies and they often take the form of literal pumps, usually the kind that are heavy enough that you surely can’t have a free hand to hold your bottle under the flow. Feet, that’s no problem.
I went back up to Castle Square via a couple more churches and souvenir shops. I hadn’t managed to get my Warsaw badge the day before and had to settle, for the third time now, for a badge with a thick ridge attached to a magnet rather than a proper badge. I will say, they’ve gone on my blanket OK. In Castle Square I encountered another Olde Timey Photographer and got another picture taken. Whereas yesterday’s took the illusion fairly seriously, this one didn’t – the modern lens was very visible in the bellows camera, there was no misdirection at the table and my newspaper front page was already printing before we got back to it. On the other hand, whereas yesterday’s front page had been a warning against a ring of professional thieves, this one was a glowing review of the lovely visitors coming to Warsaw.
My next plan was a boat trip. Where could I get on a boat and what was the easiest way of getting there without trekking 6km across the city again? Ah, a bus stop 200m away! Which is because Google Maps doesn’t know that the town is being dug up and there are no buses along here! In the end I walked all the way to the Saxon Gardens and rested my tired feet at a fountain for quite a long time. Then I found a man blowing giant bubbles as I walked through the park to the tram stop. Crowds of small children were chasing them. As an adult, I was far too sophisticated to do the same… but I wanted photos of them and to get them, you do kind of have to chase the bubbles.
The next curiosity was a delivery robot on the main road on the other side of the park – it had a face! I adored it! I wanted to take it home! Then a metro trip and I popped up by the river, and by a kind of fountain-water feature set into the pavement. Yes, I walked through it.
There wasn’t much in the way of boat trips going. I saw a sign for one but there was neither boat nor ticket office. Warsaw didn’t particularly strike me as a place with tourist sights along the river anyway. So I walked – the stadium was right in front, looking a bit like a red spaceship crouching in the city. The tram stop I presently found myself climbing up to was the one on the bridge – the one a couple of hundred metres from the Eras mural. So like every Swiftie in the city, I made my pilgrimage over to it for a selfie. Getting back to the tram stop, getting to the right platform, was harder than I’d have expected but at last, with very tired feet, I was on the tram heading home.
I would have liked to spend my last evening in some hot water. A spa of some kind, maybe with a hot tub, or a pool. But if Warsaw has anything more spa-like than massage establishments, they weren’t open on a Sunday afternoon, or accessible by public transport. Anyway, no doubt they’d be textile-free anyway and I’d seen plenty of that sort of thing at Liquidrom and Wrocław Aquapark. So I just went home, packed and sprawled on my bed. I’d be going home tomorrow.
