A City with a Sadness about It.

I was a bit worried coming through on the train from Lithuania that the passport man wasn't going to give mine back. It didn't help that he thought that it was a photo of a man (I didn't think that I looked that bad in 2000!) Thankfully we managed to convince him that it really is me. I thought about showing him my driver's licence but the picture in that looks totally different too even though it was only 18mths ago.

We got into Warsaw at about 8.30 pm and strangely enough had trouble getting a taxi at the second largest station in town. No one seemed to want our money. In the end the same taxi driver did the trip three times to get us all there. I checked in and immediately had a lovely hot shower. I hadn't had one since leaving Vilnius because the homestay didn't have hot water unless the sauna was on and you had to wash out of a basin anyway.

In the morning, I checked out before we set off for a tour of the city with Paul. The old town is actually quite small though it does have a new town attached that is really quite old but just not as old as the old town is. 90% of the old town was destroyed during the second world war and has been rebuilt since 1945. After the Uprising in 1944, the Germans just dynamited whole sections of the city out of spite.

The first place that we came to was the palace square which is naturally where the palace is. The square is partially dug up at the moment while they repave so it's not looking all that attractive but the palace is impressive in size and decoration. We continued through to the Market Square which is larger and has a statue of a mermaid at the centre. The mermaid is the symbol of Warsaw and is meant to be the sister of the mermaid in Copenhagen. Supposedly some king of Poland fell into the river and was rescued by the mermaid so he built lots of statues in her honour. She's on top of a strange fountain that periodically makes farting noises. I thought it was the French man next to me at first.

From the Square we walked onto the Barbican which is one of the remaining towers of the old city walls. It's quite unusual architecturally and isn't square to the road that it is on either. On the other side of the Barbican is the New Town which was built in the 15th century or something like that. We walked through the New Town to the very flash court building. The High Court would be complaining if they knew what a nice building their Polish counterparts were enjoying. It has a fantastic fountain with three large statues of Greek Goddesses in it that are holding the floor of the next level of the building up.

Next to the Court building and partially incorporated into it is the Monument to the Warsaw Uprising. It consists of a series of statues around a square and then a board explaining what happened on one wall. There were actually two Warsaw Uprisings which makes it a bit confusing. The first occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto when the last Jews realised that they were going to die anyway and decided to go out fighting. It was a futile fight and they all died very quickly. The second actually briefly regained control of the city and would probably have been successful if they had had some backup from overseas but they ended up having to surrender within weeks.

Across the road from the Memorial is the Church of the Armed Services. It has a huge memorial inside to all the Polish soldiers killed in the Soviet Union by the KGB in 1940/41. All of their names are written on the walls of the church as many of their bodies weren't found so the families don't have a grave to go to. The armed services still hold mass there each weekend.

We then walked back to the City walls to the memorial for the children killed in the Warsaw Uprising. It's a very sad little statue of a boy of maybe 5 or 6 wearing a soldier's helmet and little boots and carrying a gun. Thousands of children were involved in the Uprising and were killed by the Germans. Most of them worked as messengers but many of the boy scouts joined in the fighting.

You are probably seeing why I said that there is a sadness about Warsaw. In a lot of places the War was something that happened elsewhere to other people. In Warsaw it was real and it happened to everybody. The Germans for whatever reason wanted to wipe the Polish off the face of the planet and they had a damn good go at it. It was particularly at the fore while I was there because the 1st of September was the 68th anniversary of the start of the war in Poland.

We jumped on a train and headed out into the suburbs to the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising. It's a large complex built in one of the areas where the Uprising occured. It is a very impressive museum, the Poles really know what it is they are doing. It is quite graphic in parts, especially the section on the Ghetto. There is also a lot of info to try and take in if you don't know much about Polish history. It's a very sad place because they fought so hard and without any outside assistance really and when they lost the Germans destroyed everything in retaliation. The population was either killed or forced to leave after the Uprising. Several of the churches in the city were being used as hospitals and they marched in, shot all the staff and dynamited the building to bury the sick and injured inside. St Jacka's in town has 500 people buried under the marble floor of the church because they didn't know what else to do.

Children as young as 10 or 11 were joining in and a 12 year old was given the Medal of Valour posthumusly for his efforts on the front line. No one escaped persecution in Poland and no one came to help. The Russians were across the river and sat and waited for the Nazis and the Poles to kill each other before walking in and taking over. 45,000 Poles managed to hold the city for nearly 6 weeks before lack of food and medical supplies got to them. Many of the soldiers ended up in forced labour camps in Germany and the locals were relocated to Western Poland.

After the museum I went back to the hotel and grabbed my bags before heading to the hostel and checking in. It's not in the nicest suburb but the inside was nice and the staff very helpful.

I dumped my bags and then jumped onto a tram into the old town again. I wandered fairly aimlessly for a couple of hours. Popping into churches now and then. I went to the church that had been destroyed by the Nazis and the floor has all the bodies of the patients underneath. It had a very sad feel about it.

It started to get cold after a little while so I went into an internet cafe to kill some time before our final group dinner. We went to a restaurant called the Barbikan which was surprise surprise near the Barbican. It was pretty good and not too expensive. I had steak followed by hot apple pie and ice cream. I came back to the hostel afterwards to find that someone else had been sleeping in my bed so I moved their sheets and got into it myself. I was going to be asleep by the time they got back so I didn't care.

Friday was another busy day despite the bad weather. I got up and headed to the central train station to buy a ticket to get to Bialowieza. It was easier than buying tickets in Russia even though the ticket seller spoke no english. After that I wandered around the bottom of the Palace of Culture and Science (Isn't it a great name for a building? I think that I'm going to name my house that.). It was a gift to the Poles from the Russians and the locals know it as the elephant in lacy underwear and I will admit that it is a little over the top. It actually looks like it should be in Gotham City. It now is a capitalist mecca with shops, a cinema, offices for companies. There are lots of great statues around the bottom of men working without their shirts on and women in slinky dresses holding books (I'm not sure if that is culture or science).

It had started to rain so I jumped on a tram up into the city to start my walk for the day. I walked down the Royal Way which runs from Palace Square in the city to Lazienki Park in the suburbs where the royal family used to have their summer house. First of the sights is St Anne's church which is most notable for being the only church that I've ever seen to be advertising a pizza place off the belfry. The next major church is the Carmelite Church. It's really very lovely on the outside but I didn't get a chance to go in because there was a service going on. Next door to the church is the President's house which is fairly low key. You can just wander past the open gates and take photos of the statues in the front yard. There is just the one soldier hanging around out the front. I was quite amazed. It has a great statue of a prince in the front. He is dressed as a Roman for some reason while riding his horse. There are also four lions that look like they are having a rectal exam.

I then made a diversion from the Royal Way to go to the tomb of the unknown soldier. It's undercover on the edge of a park (I'm sure the soldiers are very grateful for that). It's a nice little memorial that does not only the world wars but all the wars since 900 and something. There is a really nice park behind it called Saxon Gardens and I wandered around this until it started raining again. I then looked at the outside of the Gallery of Modern Art, the Evangelical Church and the Museum of Ethnography before heading back to the Royal Way.

The next major church is the Visitation Church of the Sisters of St Joseph (try fitting that on the sign!). The outside is baroque and the inside Rococco. Unfortunately it was locked so I could only look in through the window but it was tacky. The pulpit looked like a large white sailing ship.

The next group of buildings is the University which is sure as hell prettier than UTAS. In the middle of the buildings is the Church of the Holy Cross (I guess students have a lot to confess and pray for). It was one of the places that the Pope did mass when he came to Poland. The Pope is still adored here. Not that new German one but good old JP II. I lit a fake candle here for Nan. They don't seem to do real candles in Poland. But you can put your money in and get one that is electric and flickers like a candle. I really wanted to take a photo but I thought it would be rude. I was going to stop for lunch at this point but was distracted by a very large tub of raspberries for only $3.50 so I had them instead.

I continued down the Royal Way until St Alexander's which is Roman looking and built in the middle of a roundabout. There I turned off and headed into the embassy district and through a park until  I got to Lazienki Park.

The park is quite big and has quite a few buildings in Roman style with lots of statues of nymphs and fauns and stuff like that. The garden is lovely and has lots of animals including peacocks. I was going to sit in the park and write postcards but it started to rain again so I headed back to the hostel. I stopped off at the supermarket on the way back and that night had my first meal cooked by me in over 6 months. It was so good.

Saturday I headed off to the Jewish Quarter to see the Ghetto memorials. I couldn't do everything because it was the Sabbath but I did maybe half. I started with the Ghetto Heroes Monument which is large and dark stone. It has Jewish fighters on one side and a Rabbi leading a group of people on the other. I couldn't read the inscription because it's in Hebrew and Polish. Slightly further up the street is a memorial to a group of leaders who died in a bunker on the site during the Ghetto uprising. There were lots of basements and bunkers in the ghetto and the Nazis either set fire to them or gassed them. Many of the people in this bunker commited suicide rather than surrender. There were over 100 of them but they only know who 40 of them were. Their names are on the list at the memorial. The whole memorial is made with rubble from the building that used to stand there. There is nothing left of the Ghetto really. It's now just an ordinary suburb of Warsaw except for the scattered memorials to famous Jews that once lived here and died in various death camps. The Umschlagplatz Memorial is being renovated at the moment so it has lost a lot of its impact.

From there  I walked for a while to go to a Citadel that I didn't know existed. On the way I passed another memorial this time to the Polish people who were sent to gulags in Russia during the Russian occupation. It's a striking memorial with a train track with all the names of the places they were sent to written on it and then a train car with crosses in it.

The Citadel was built by the Tsar after a local rebellion to try and frighten the locals into behaving. Most of it is currently used by the military so you can't go in but there is a small museum about the political prison, Pavillion Ten. Unfortunately they didn't have any english information in the museum as it was really interesting. They had some of the cells still set up as they were and photos of all the people who were held there prior to being sent to Siberia. They have some interesting artwork by an artist who was deported but eventually made it back. It's quite and eerie place and it didn't help that I was the only visitor.  It's worth a visit if you have time and is free.

I then walked back into the old town to get something to eat but wandered aimlessly for an hour before deciding what I wanted. I then tried to go to the history museum but it was closed for the weekend. So I came down to the National Museum instead which is actually more of an art gallery. Saturday is their free day but it would be worth the cost of admission on other days. I went to three exhibits because I only had a couple of hours before closing time. The first was a collection of religious art from around Poland. It was just brilliant. Most of it was late Gothic and truly beautiful. They had some great explanatory material in English which helped a lot. I'm not that up on my saints. They have done a great job of repairing a lot of the material because most of it is over 500 years old. They had a section which showed how the statues were made. I didn't realise that they plaster and put fabric over the wood. The depictions of Mary are really interesting because she is fair haired and peachy complexioned in nearly all of them. I then moved onto the Ancient cultures section which had some nice Greek sculptures and a good collection of Egyptian things. The Faras collection is much more interesting. It has a whole lot of frescos and murals from a group of churches in Nubia. Polish scientists collected them before the Aswan Dam was built. Most of them are from the 9-12th centuries and are in surprisingly good condition. The style of the art is quite interesting and they don't look Nubian at all. You can see the Byzantine influence.

I then came back to the hostel to pack for my trip onto Bialowieza. It was so nice to get my clothes back from the laundry. They smell so good. So stay tuned for the national park.