And at last it’s going home day! The reality of this trip was almost as long as the blog posts about it – by the time I woke up in Warsaw on that last morning, to the first rain I’d seen since my first day in Berlin, it all felt so long ago I could hardly remember it. I’d been round Berlin, I’d taken the train to Poznań, I’d spent two days in Wrocław, I’d stopped off in Łódź, I’d had two days in Warsaw and I’d seen Taylor Swift, all in just ten days. And now I had one last one.
The correct thing to do would be to leave my luggage at reception, since my plane wasn’t until 18:35. Even allowing for the fact that I wanted to be there by 4.30 and needing an hour or so to get there, wherever the airport actually is, that would be the best part of an entire day in Warsaw and I didn’t want to do it with my luggage on my back. But I somehow didn’t feel very friendly towards reception, ever since they told me on Friday evening that my EU driving licence, which I’d used in Poznań and Łódź, didn’t count as ID. No, it may not count when you’re getting on an international plane but it’s perfectly acceptable ID for checking into a poxy hotel and anyway, it’s right here in this little bag by my hand, whereas my passport is buried in its pouch in the personal item down by my feet. Anyway, there was no one at reception and I went out with my big 45l backpack on and my personal item in my hand in a sort of wave of spite, in which the only person who lost out was me.
It had been grey up on the tenth floor but once I got outside, I discovered that it was raining. Well, what could one do in Warsaw in the rain? In Iceland, I’d be straight off to a geothermal pool but the only pool I could find within relatively easy reach in Warsaw didn’t seem the type to be able to store luggage while I swam. Well, I’d figure it out. I’d go straight to Wschodnia station, where I’d arrived on Friday, and make a decision there about my next destination. Sitting on the bus, somewhere between my hotel and the station, I came across the Neon Museum. I’m not a museumy sort of person but that would do. That would be inside and would take good pictures. I would go there! So I jumped off the bus, followed Google Maps in a ridiculously convoluted route and found the museum looking somewhat abandoned. Of course, it’s all reclaimed industrial style but it means if you arrive and it’s closed and you don’t realise it’s closed at first, the whole thing looks quite unwelcoming. It wasn’t that it was closed, it was just that on Mondays, it doesn’t open until lunchtime. Well, I wasn’t standing there, under the overhang of a nearby office building, for two hours in the pouring rain. I scampered back to the bus stop, got on the next bus and got off two minutes later at Wschodnia.
The first decision I made here was to put my luggage in a locker. I figured out how to use the card payment, I separated out anything I’d want for the next four or five hours and I locked the door and immediately felt incredibly guilty. I was slightly concerned for the safety of all my luggage but not too much because these things are supposed to be trustworthy and people use them all the time. No, I felt like I’d abandoned my own child, even though it’s just a heavy bag full of too many clothes and books and ten little pots of nail varnish so I could top up my Eras nails along the way. Standing outside the station, waiting for whichever tram came along, I was so tempted to just run back in and rescue my baby.
I got on the tram and sailed off into town, which followed much the same route I’d been using for two days, except I went round the north of the stadium instead of the south and finished up at Centrum again. Centrum, as I think I mentioned yesterday, is right outside the Palace of Culture & Science. It had been on my to-do list and I felt vaguely guilty again that I hadn’t got round to visiting it. Well, now I had the time and I was right there!
The Palace of Culture and Science is one of Stalin’s skyscrapers, given to Warsaw as a distinctly unwelcome gift of friendship. If you haven’t come across these things, they’re a set of yellowish stone skyscrapers – not as tall as today’s gigantic buildings because they were built around the 1950s, but so much more… is spectacular the right word? Modern glass skyscrapers generally go straight up and down. These ones are square towers with decorative edges to the tops of the towers, with shorter towers around the bottom, making them almost pyramid-shaped and usually with a thinner tower coming out of the top. Any city with a distinctive tall structure tells the same joke – that the best view is from the top of it because that’s the only place you can’t see the thing. Well, I like to see a city from above if I can so I was always going to go up it. Warsaw’s skyscraper contains two museums, four theatres, a multiplex cinema, an exhibition space, several educational spaces, a lot of offices and – most importantly for me – a viewing platform on the 30th floor.
Get there reasonably early in the morning and it’ll take seconds to buy a ticket and only a few minutes to queue for the lift. There are only two lifts and they can only take a dozen or so people at a time. It’s all very gold and shiny – for a load of communists who allegedly didn’t believe in personal wealth, they were really into gold and extravagance. It’s only a minute or so up to the 30th floor and then…
Well, there’s a lot up there. Obviously the big draw is the 360° viewing platform. You go outside and you walk around, looking through massive windows with wire grids across them – wire grids with a surprising number of love locks attached to them. A Soviet monument doesn’t feel like the sort of romantic place you might want to declare your everlasting love – I think if my love wanted to put a love lock there, I might reconsider whether this really was my love. Mind you, given how much I despise love locks, if they wanted to put a lock anywhere, I might reconsider things. Now, as I mentioned, it was raining. If you want to go up a skyscraper for views over a city, maybe go up there on a day when there isn’t a massive cloud sitting right on top of said city. It was also freezing up there. I’d left my jumper locked away back at Wschodnia and my raincoat is insubstantial if you’re cold. So I went inside to appreciate the other facilities.
First was the coffee shop, which is in the square corridor that runs around the inside of the viewing gallery. I bought a cup of hot chocolate and then wandered down to find a fairly peaceful table in a bit of corridor that didn’t have tourists crossing from lift to view every three seconds. Nice. Good hot chocolate. Then I went to the tiny shop for some postcards, partly because I wanted some for my scrapbook and partly because I wanted to turn some notes into some coins so I could get a souvenir gold medallion for my scrapbook. These things are absolutely stupid and I love them. I love to put them on a piece of magnetic sheet in scrapbooks and I didn’t really have anything more tactile in the book so far than postcards and public transport tickets. But it took so long to break down a note into coins!
The other thing you can do inside is have your photo taken and superimposed onto a beam so it looks like you’re dangling off the edge of the building. I was tempted but it would have required more coins and I found coins hard work to get hold of in Poland. So I went round the views again, spotting the stadium and the hotel that word on the street (literally; I overheard it walking around the Old Town yesterday) was that Taylor Swift was staying in and trying to spot my own hotel, the Old Town, the park – anything I’d been to or seen, I wanted to spot from above. Not so easy in the cloud or when you’re quite short-sighted.
At last I descended. I couldn’t figure out how the lift didn’t deliver us to the same place where we’d boarded – it’s exactly the same lift, life shafts are straight, where on earth are we but eventually realised that it drops off on the floor below where it picks up so you don’t end up with chaos of trying to squeeze people in and out at the same time. It’s half a floor up to get to the lift so when you leave, you’re leaving on the flat level.
I finished my half-day in Warsaw by walking around the Old Town yet again via the metro to my now-favourite Ratusz-Arsenal. It was quiet. Really quiet. Was it the fact that it was Monday lunchtime instead of the weekend? Was it the fact that it was pouring with rain? Or was it the fact that the Swifties had finally gone home? What does Warsaw look like on a summer weekend when the Eras tour isn’t in town? Had I seen a typical sunny weekend or not? Anyway, hardly anyone around! I got to see the square without a thousand heads in the way! I got to take a selfie with the Warsaw Mermaid without fifty heads blocking her out! I went in a souvenir shop without dramatically overheated and bought an amber bracelet and then I walked up to Castle Square and got a picture of the place without several hundred people in the way! Oh, tourism is so much better without the tourists!
For the last two days, I’d walked a couple of kilometres back to the nearest metro or tram stop but with enough room to breathe and enough room to take a look around, I discovered that there was a tram stop almost directly underneath the square, if you just scampered down the side of the bridge holding the square up – another thing I hadn’t noticed before. The tram I was looking for came along as I was still walking towards it, so I had to run, and then instead of continuing to Wschodnia, I dived off a the sight of a pretty Gothic church. I am such a sucker of all things Gothic. I had plenty of time. It was indeed a nice church, much less touristy than the ones in town and therefore much quieter. Because it was raining, my shoes squeaked hideously and so I moved around in a ludicrous cartoony way, trying to not make too much noise. I liked the stained glass here but it didn’t inspire such mania in me as the ones on Saturday. These ones had portraits in rose windows above the rectangular panes – again, a mix of Biblical and more modern and I particularly liked St Lukasz who was holding a cow.
Back on the tram, back to the junction at the bottom of the road Wschodnia was on, where I changed trams for some reason – maybe my one didn’t actually go to the station. I had a bit of an issue here because the tram my phone told me to get on simply didn’t exist and that meant I had to sit for ten or fifteen minutes back at the stop I’d originally been at. Got my luggage back, safe and sound. Went to buy a ticket for the train to the airport to discover there were two airports. “Oh yes, I definitely want Chopin Airport” I said, not feeling anywhere near as definite as I hope I sounded. The lady behind the counter told me it was cheaper to buy a ticket on the train and so I ran for the right platform, only to discover that this is a commuter train and part of Warsaw’s public transport network. Not only that, but the airport is in zone 1, which meant it was covered by my 72-hour ticket and the nice lady at the ticket desk had saved me buying an extra ticket unnecessarily. So now I’d used Warsaw’s buses, trams, metro and now the commuter train as well. One last train for my big train journey.
There was only one last thing worth mentioning. I bought a mug. I’d been glancing covetously at mugs with elaborate Polish decoration on them but refusing to buy any. I don’t need a mug. I can’t get a mug home safely. Do not buy a mug. But at the airport I spotted a mug the size of a bucket. I bought it. The idiot boy at this counter wrapped it in half a piece of bubble wrap which meant it didn’t fit in the tiny plastic bag he gave me. How on earth was I going to get this thing back home in one piece? Well, I did. And the next day I measured its capacity. Now, we all know Sports Direct mugs are the biggest mugs on the planet. Spill one of them and you’re going to flood your entire house. It turns out a Sports Direct mug contains nearly 600ml of liquid. My Polish mug contains an entire litre. I need to pick it up with two hands. It’s nearly four times the size of an average mug. It is unbelievably enormous. It is the best thing ever and one day I’m going to be brave enough to casually drink from it on a work call and see what everyone else does when they notice it.
And that’s it! Eleven days across Germany and Poland, five cities and fourteen trains, if you count that it took two London Tube trains to get from the car park at Heathrow to the Eurostar, a U-Bahn and an S-Bahn to get out of central Berlin and a commuter train to get to Warsaw Airport. Would I do it again? Well, within a month I was planning another ten-day five-city train trip, but I think maybe it’s too much for one trip and is now cut down to seven days, one city and no trains. I don’t regret the Eras Train Tour and I wouldn’t change it (I do wish I’d had longer to enjoy the apartment in Poznań and the hotel in Łódź) but in future, five cities in ten or eleven days is maybe too many.