Warsaw: Day II

Photo: Artwork for sale at the Old Town Square.

After a night of sleep where I dreamt of GRE math problems (I think I can safely attribute this to having fallen asleep while calculating Zloty-Euro conversions in my head), I awoke to find my legs and knees somewhat sore from the previous day’s walks. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to further explore this city by foot, although we planned to stay closer to the center of town and eventually made use of public transit to some degree.

The first stop for my wife and I was the Saxon Gardens, a nice tree-filled area just to the north of our hotel. While the gardens were ostensibilly devoid of greenery due to the winter weather, we still enjoyed examining the numerous sculptures, fooling around in the playground (my wife’s spin on the merry-go-round was a somewhat late-in-life first-time experience) and admiring the sizeable population of ducks in the pond there. (Ducks happen to be one of my favorite waterfowl.) After an hour or so of these amusements we stopped at the Polish version of the tomb of the unknown soldier, a seemingly understated monument, that was located at the north end of the gardens. The surroundings, however, were fairly stirring. The monument faced a large, almost entirely empty plaza, paved over flat with squares of concrete. However, on two sides of the monument, excavations had revealed what appeared to be the cellars of pre-war housing; the shells of these underground sites extended in each direction on both the east and west sides of the plaza probably around 100 meters, and then of course there were the undisturbed sections of the plaza which surely conceal similar ruins beneath the concrete surface. (Note: after further review, I've found that the ruins may actually have been associated with the Saxon Palace that occupied these grounds before the war but was never rebuilt.)

Afterwards, we headed back to the Old Town again for a final look at that plaza and the surrounding streets. The area was much more lively today, probably due in part to the fact that all the shops and restaurants were open for business, but also because the weather was fairly clear, although crisp. The additional tourist traffic brought a tangible „open for business“ atmosphere with it; horse-drawn carriages toted visitors around the square, and entrepeneurs offered a range of wares such as wood carvings, paintings, stamp collections and souvenier trinkets – some working the crowd with discretion, others with tremendous panache. The guy who politely approached my wife and I with his stamp collection but who refused to leave until we said „no“ a third time sticks in my head. Nonetheless, I preferred the atmosphere today over yesterday, when a drunk guy (albeit a tri-lingual drunk guy) approached us and asked for a zloty so that he could buy a beer. I appreciated the honesty, but it’s not easy to give out money – even such a triffling amount -- for such reasons when you’re on a limited budget yourself, and in the end, it’s just an uncomfortable situation. Still, I wish that guy the best of luck, and will have to think of him tonight when I crack open my own bottle of suds. But I digress.

After snapping off a few more photos in the low but pleasent winter sun, we walked toward the New Town for a lunch of borscht and pierogis filled with seasoned meat. We shared the rather smokey restaurant with a couple groups of Austrian and British tourists – the Poles apparently preferred to sit at the bar rather than in the larger lounge area. From there we hiked over to the subway, where unlike in several European cities, you must buy tickets in advance and feed them through a kind of an admission machine, similar to the turnstiles in the Washington DC or New York City metros. We only took the subway two stops (an incredibily clean system, but also a rather small one) to the „Centrum“ station, where we got off and headed to the national museum, stopping on the way to buy an apple danish and the most enormous rum and raisin ball I have ever attempted to eat.

While from the outside, the national museum didn’t look all that impressive, I was actually quite pleased with the interior. Seeing as how Poland rivals Italy for Europe’s most devout Catholic nation, perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me much that the musuem’s collections are made up primarily of artwork pertaining to this branch of Christianity. From the numerous gruesome crucefixes (some of them disturbingly realistic), wooden alterpieces (carved and assembled with obvious mastery) and religious statues on display there, many of them dating to the 15th century, one quickly gets a fuller understanding of the significance that religion has for the national character. And I must say that while originally I had hoped to do more exploring of the city on foot – at first I considered spending time in a museum to be a waste of the precious few daylight hours Poland gets this time of year – in the end I felt quite pleased and enlightened to a degree to have visited; once I made the realization that a good number of the works on display had been saved or salvaged from World War II destruction, I appreciated them more as legitimate pieces of Polish national treasure. One huge and intricate wooden alterpiece, for example, came from one of the Gdansk churches that we had visited a couple of days before – a church that was still undergoing reconstruction.

Anyway, we stayed at the museum from about 2:00 until closing time at 4:00 (apparently many Poles arrive to and leave work earlier in order to maximize sunlight hours), and after that we bought some groceries and made our way back to our hotel by foot along Nowy Swiat, one of the trendier commercial streets in Warsaw, which is lined with shops and restaurants before it turns into Krakowskie Przedmiescie, the street that heads to the castle and Old Town.