18th
Walking tour of Warsaw
Hello, friends, I am back with another narrative of a day in a fine city in Europe. Our flight to Warsaw on Monday got in late, but the hotel/B&B/thing was nice (we discovered later we had the only room with a private bathroom). Well, it was only sort of nice at 6am when the construction outside started, but we learned in subsequent nights that shutting the window didn’t make the room too hot to sleep.
We got up at a reasonable hour and found a coffee shop for breakfast, although “found” isn’t really accurate because the place is covered in coffee shops. I read about it online, but seriously, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a coffee shop. They mostly appear to double as pubs at night, which is how they can all stay in business. Also we have yet to encounter open wifi in Europe. They all seem to be “wifi with purchase” and they’ll give you the login on the receipt, so you don’t see any local-Austin type coffee shops with a bunch of people on laptops, even though we were near a university. That might be related to the price of laptops, though.
Anyway! On to pictures. We went to Old Town and tried to spot A) buildings that seemed to be intact from before WWII and B) other metalheads going to the concert.
Here are a couple shots of a central square; it was very pretty:
See humongous green roof? We went looking for that, for obvious reasons.
On our journey we came across a creepy church door,
some (I assume) replica WWII medals,
and another square with nice outdoor restaurants and people selling touristy stuff.
I found out later that this was all destroyed and yet rebuilt: a gated entrance with high brick walls to either side
complete with arrow slits! :D (these are exciting)
We realized we’d gone too far for the green-roofed building, so we took an ice cream break and backtracked. I spotted some buttresses - a clue!
Look at this place - it appeared to be the tallest building in the area:
That explains the roof. I have no explanation for this, however. It never occurred to me to immortalize war heroes (??) in stained glass, but then I was never in a war or much of a church builder:
Food! We had been told about restaurant with traditional Polish food, so we checked it out. Robin’s meal was pretty damn good, but mine, well, I made the mistake in New York once of ordering wasabi mashed potatoes, and I made the mistake in Poland of ordering horseradish mashed potatoes. Just don’t do it, trust me.
But it’s so pretty!
Next up: Chopin museum, of which I only have pics of the outside. Man, these guys love Chopin. He was a badass, and they’re really proud of that.
Pimpin’.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was our touristy day in Warsaw. We went back to the hotel and took a nap before going out with the Swedes. Wednesday was the concert, which I will post about as soon as I can (falling way behind here, can you tell? :) I wrote this post on the train to Prague Thursday, and it’s now Friday and raining and we’re going to try to brave the weather and go see the castle. I got some really great night shots yesterday, will try to catch up on my posts asap!
