Europe 2017: Day #22 A Warm Day in Warsaw

Thursday, 24 August 217

After a brief shower overnight the day started bright and clear; a perfect blue sky.  And you could tell it was starting to heat up. Not furnace hot but certainly warmer than we had been experiencing up to that point.

Our aim for the day was to get to an early morning free walking tour of the Old Town and then take things as they came. We had no major plans past lunch time.

I've come to the conclusion that it is never wise to rely on the estimates of walking times given by hotel staff.  For some reason they always seem to under-estimate the time it takes to get anywhere.  We wanted to get to the tourist information office in the Old Town main square and were informed that it was only 10 minutes or so from our hotel.  So we set off in the direction indicated and 45 minutes or so later we reached our destination.  Maybe he thought we meant by car. Maybe he thought we meant to the main street. Maybe I'm just making excuses for him.

In any event it was a good walk; flat, smooth footpath, and an excellent street to wander along. The tourist info office wasn't a lot of help as we already had most of the information we wanted so we sat and waited and picked up the walking tour at the right spot at the right time.

Warsaw Old Town main square

What we were soon to learn was that the Warsaw Old Town was anything but. The city had been pretty much leveled during the Second World War so everything we saw on the walking tour was a reconstruction. A good one, but a reconstruction nonetheless.

The tour gave us a good overview of Polish history, which basically consists of one military conflict after another; one foreign takeover of the country followed by their overthrow, followed by...and so on and so forth. It was all good stuff, being the facts of history hundreds of years ago.  Until we hit the 20th century, and then things got ugly, in a big way.

Our tour guide didn't gloss over the Jewish extermination in Warsaw and neither did he dwell on it overly.  Still it's hard to avoid when you walk over evidence of the Warsaw ghetto all through the Old Town as the wall is marked on the street.

Our post-lunch plans went awry when I misinterpreted the name Copernicus Science Center as being a museum.  After a very long walk we found it to be an interactive science showpiece rather like ScienceWorks in Melbourne, and full - they had too many people in the building and had stopped selling tickets.

Tired and weary as the day had been heating up as expected we caught a cab to the central railway station to check out our train departure location a few days in advance and to visit the main tourist centre situated at the base of the Palace of Culture and Science, a "gift" to the Polish people from the USSR in 1955.

Coming to the realisation that Warsaw was a big place, that it was only going to get warmer and that we had a lot of ground to cover, we opted to purchase one day Hop-On/Hop-Off bus passes, get on the next one and just sit for an hour or so.

It proved to be a wise move and we ended our day with a quiet beer, before a change of clothes and then dinner.