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Whenever traveling to new places, we try and temper our expectations lest reality falls horribly on its face by comparison. In Warsaw however, we could have let our expectations loose and dialed all the way up to red. In short, the initial impression after just a few short days is that it is a fascinating city; a confluence of traditional European old town, modern commerce-style skyscrapers with all the glass and steel you could hope for and cold war-era east block, nondescript and more than a little depressing.

Warsaw is able to coexist without ever feeling confused or apologetic about its multiple personalities. Narrow cobblestone streets mix with massive autostradas where, as a pedestrian, you do not start to cross unless you were already there waiting before the light turned green. At least I won’t. The Warsawians seem to have adapted to a different, faster, rhythm moving around in this city, however. It’s a strange feeling for someone who by most standards walks fairly briskly to routinely be passed by fellow pedestrians; some of whom puffing away on cigarettes as they rush past.

While of course there are cars aplenty, it is by no means the only show in town. Without necessarily making comparisons to other European cities, the Warsaw system of trains, trams and buses are in place for a the single purpose of moving people around with a minimum of fuss. They are both frequent and cheap. A 20min ticket (good if you don’t need to transfer to another tram e.g.) costs 3.40zl. One might be forgiven for drawing parallels to Copenhagen and Rotterdam in terms of bicycle use in Warsaw. Bike lanes are everywhere and presumably due to the speed that bikers are whizzing by, the city has painted crosswalks that are highly recommended to use when crossing these lanes.

Despite being unabashed city-dwellers, we don’t apologize for occasionally seeking refuge in parks. Warsaw has a number of them of varying sizes. We made a point of paying our respects at the Tomb of the unknown soldier in Saxon Park, which also hosts pretty decent fountain that I’m sure tells a story that I’m completely ignorant of.

 

The biggest park, weighing in at a whopping 76 hectares, Łazienki Park is impressive to say the least. On Sunday, in addition to just going to see the park itself, we were given another reason to do so; The 59th annual Chopin recitals starts traditionally in mid-May and we were lucky enough to be there and know about it. The classical composer Chopin is a bit of a national treasure in Warsaw and one of the local societies is kind enough to put on weekly concerts/recitals for free in this grandiose setting. It was surprising and encouraging to me to see so many young people (20 and 30 somethings) in addition to the more mature audience. More surprising still was that people generally took a break from staring at their mobile devices and just enjoyed the music in the moment.

Despite being pummeled during World War II, Warsaw does have a completely rebuilt ‘old town’ that is worth a visit. Just don’t expect something radically different or uniquely Polish. It’s pretty much the standard cobblestone streets down picturesque alleys spilling out into traditional squares. Said squares are filled to the gunwales with sun umbrella-covered patios tethered to their affiliated eateries by the steady and relentless stream of servers doing their frenzied dance between onlookers and the undecideds. With very few exceptions, we generally leave those over-priced ventures for the ‘Europe in 10 days’ crowd so we moved on to something much more interesting, perhaps because it was recommended that we don’t:

 

Despite not speaking the language so the details were admittedly lost on us, we would have been remiss should we have avoided an energetic, and completely peaceful, political rally. Poland is the birthplace of ‘Solidarity’ after all. This time it was the opposition party, Civic Platform, who lost in the last election to the Law and Justice party as even Poland got swept up in the right-of-centre, anti-EU sentiment wave that currently is embroiling much of Europe.

 

For those who are planning on visiting Warsaw, have an interest in history and at least a mild tolerance for curated content, I can recommend the Warsaw Uprising museum. It is probably the museum in my experience where the whole building, interior design and the exhibit is completely coordinated. The most glowing recommendation I can give is that it was so immersive, so captivating that school children (and there were numerous presumably owing to dedicated field trips) were engaged. The curator even went as far as in the basement, wait for it, building a replica sewer (devoid of any replica sewage, thankfully) to give a more tactile impression of how the home army were able to move around without alerting the German soldiers above. Don’t forget to pick up a map (not of the sewer, but the museum as a whole) as otherwise it’s not always obvious where to go next chronologically.

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