For a week in June, my friend Taylor and I traveled from Berlin to Wrocław to Warsaw, and met up with another friend, Hanna. This is the final post, on mine and Taylor’s last few days in Warsaw.
Camera: Olympus XA
Lens: Olympus F-Zuiko 35mm 1:2.8
Film: Fujifilm Superia X-Tra 400
Warsaw
The final location for our trip Warsaw. We took the train mid-morning from Wrocław, a high-speed direct route 4-hours through the Polish countryside. I love the European train system, I make a point to travel by train any time I can. I love seeing the countryside, and going through the smaller towns, or even coming through larger towns and watching how rural farms give way to suburbs and then follow in to a train station. I listened to a book and watched out the window almost the whole way there.
Warsaw is a big, tall city. Modern skyscrapers spring up in concrete and glass from the shoulders of shorter buildings below. It is much less green than Wrocław but still had wide tree-lined boulevards for cars and spacious paved walkways and plazas for pedestrians. Our BnB was dead-on City Center, the top floor of a complex with a balcony looking out over the tallest building in Poland, Pałac Kultury i Nauki (the Palace of Culture and Science). I felt that I could sit on this balcony and watch the city for hours. There is something about being up above like that which makes you feel a little like royalty.
Since we were hungry, we walked to a nearby commercial area for dinner, had burgers and beer and then did some leisurely walking. Eventually we stopped at a Czech restaurant for another beer and were surprised to find that they typically are served with ‘3 fingers’ of foam on the top. There was even an option on the menu to order a glass almost entirely filled to the brim with foam. We did not try it, but found right away the Czech beer is extremely rich and the foam is more like a cream floating on top. The evening was hot and sticky and we didn’t feel much like staying out so we walked back to the apartment.
The next day, we woke up late and got sweet crepes for breakfast at a cafe whose exact theme escapes me but mostly involved bowler hats and bicycle wheels. We then walked over to the Chopin museum. The museum is housed in a ‘small’ palace adjacent to a music school and a public park. I wanted to go since I had played some of Chopin’s pieces when I was younger and always enjoyed listening to them. I thought the museum was well-designed and comfortable – very dim lighting allows you to focus on a variety of artifacts from Chopin’s life, and a plethora of opportunities for listening and watching his pieces being played made the experience warmly multi-sensory. For the most part, you are in this high-ceilinged former cellar, dimly lit, and listening to his pieces being performed. I enjoyed the way it was curated a lot..
Upstairs they also had narrated recordings of his letters that shed some light on his private life. I particularly loved his description of England, in that he hated it and he did not believe they understood music as an artform. I also liked the entirely black room representing the day of his death, which contained a replica of his death mask, brass castings of his hands, and locks of his hair – the right kind of morbid for my tastes. Afterwards we walked through the park to the art history museum. There was a deep nostalgia for me on the way, as we walked past the practice rooms for the music school, and I could hear practice sessions of all kinds floating out the windows. Once I too had spent summers in hot, un-airconditioned practice rooms perfecting something and sweating. I felt a certain kinship.
Taylor and I stopped for a drink at an outdoor patio in one of the many vast plazas in the city. The art history museum was nearby, so we purchased tickets and spent the afternoon touring a epic history of art, starting with medieval Polish art (namely church art) and ending with post-soviet psychadelica. Though the collection of art was indeed impressive for this museum, I wouldn’t count it among my favorites for the trip. There was very little narrative provided to give context to any of the particular pieces. Pieces are only provided with the artist, the material, and the title. Thus, as you walk through the collection, it all starts to blend in to one another and the long hallways become disorientingly maze-like. I would have liked to read more stories or highlights from any particularly interesting work displayed there.
We ended our final day in Warsaw and in Poland as a whole by ascending to the top of the Pałac Kultury i Nauki to overlook the whole city, and then stopped for dessert and cocktails at an outdoor restaurant near the BnB. The next day would be flying.
I think I decided immediately upon arriving in Wrocław that I liked Poland, and I wish I had more time to see more of the country. There are many other notable cities to visit, and places that I didn’t get to see. Waiting 6 years to see a friend again is entirely too long. Now I have an excuse to go back again, and we even talked about planning a trip to meet somewhere else in between. I’m terrible at summing up, so below are some choice pictures from Warsaw. Do widzenia!
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