Welcome to Squirrel City!

Time for another weekend trip!

First of all: mužić is back ;) After I had brought about 1020 pages (not kidding) of personal relationship evidence to the Ausländerbehörde in Berlin  to prove to them that we didn´t have a fake marriage but actually like each other, the Behörden were surprisingly quick and two days later my baby was good to go! So, I have him baaaaaaaaack! YAY!

Since this was a lot faster than we thought it was going to be, my weekend trip with Laura to fill in time until he came was scheduled one week later. Cancel? No, bus and hostel were booked, and we had both never been to Warsaw, so let´s go!

Friday evening, Lauri and me met up at the ZOB in Berlin and together we boarded the Simple Express, with which I had travelled to Vilnius the previous year. Literally over night we were in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, and at 6am we scrambled out of the bus with sleepy eyes and excitement in the heart to be in a new city, even if it the streets were deserted and all night-time foggy.

That day, we learned what it meant to freeze. And by freeze, I mean really freeze.

When it comes to temperatures, I´m a bit of a whimp. Camping when it´s cold and wet? Ewww. Being outside and freezing…hmmm…better stay inside and have another cup of hot tea! No kidding, my tolerance levels for frozen toes is quite low.

But when you are travelling, it would be a bit stupid to stay inside and drink hot tea all day. So we braved the zero degrees outside temperature and took part in a Free Walking Tour of the city. Even the way there was amazing because Warsaw city had definitely not been a cheapskate when it came to Christmas decorations and because they were obviously very proud of them, they still had them up. Which looked great in daytime

but even better in the night:

So in a relatively big group of Irish, English, Australian, Dutch and us being the only Germans (whaad!), we set off to the tour. The guide showed us the royal castle:

The old city center:

All having being rebuilt after WWII since 94% of the city had been flattened to the ground.

After one and a half hours, with shattering teeth and the cold having crept in our bones, we dodged out and had the chocolatiest hot chocolate of the universe, the famous Polish Wedel chocolates:

After that, we walked around some more on our own, chilled in the hostel, and only emerged later for mixed Pirogi dinner at a restaurant where the waitresses wore the shortest Dirndl dresses we had both ever seen as a work uniform. Since I didn´t exactly want to photograph their naked legs (is sexism against my own gender still sexism?), I´ll show you a picture of our dinner instead:

The next day, we walked all the way to the Royal Palace Park, failing to find the Royal Palace, but seeing deer and FEEDING SQUIRRELS instead! I don´t know if there´s always so many tame squirrels around or if it was just because we were there so early but they jumped on us, climbed us and looked in our fur hoodies for nuts or anything edible. I literally died of cuteness there and then and these squirrels made my day.

From there we caught a bus that miraculously brought us directly to the center (we had no idea, we really wanted to show the bus driver the map and tell him where we wanted to go but he couldn´t be bothered with small concerns of everyday people so he just waved us through. We were a bit confused but soon found out – to our grand delight – it was exactly the right bus) and we were just in time to the changing of the guards at the grave of the unknown soldier:

I always find these military procedures with shouting of commands and hitting your boots together and marching quite estranging, most of all because I don´t see this very often. Also, those poor men are made to stand at that monument for hours on end without moving – I couldn´t even make it for one and a half and we DID move in between! How do they do that? Polish blood? Harden up? Have those self-warming diving-suit-thingies underneath? I couldn´t ask, either, so this shall always be a secret to me.

We visited the royal castle (free admission sundays! whoop) and enjoyed the characteristical royalty of the rooms that had been made to look like they were before the war. Marble, gold, big chandeliers, one room, ante room, throne room, expensive wooden floors, castle.

And lots of paintings. What´s funny is that the most celebrated Warsaw painter (painting actual Warsaw land- and cityscapes) came from Venice and bore the name Bellotto.

After a quick break in a cozy café we tried the Tour again, this time theJewish Tour. There´s actually nothing left of the former Jewish quarter and/or Ghetto either, but we were shown its dimensions and told its stories. At the height of the Ghetto, there were half a million Jews living a crammed and starved life in the Ghetto. Half a million. That´s nearly two times as many people as live in Neukölln now. Neukölln is pretty big, the Ghetto was also big (we took the tram from one end to the other, and it was about four or five stops taking eight minutes) – but HALF A MILLION!?

Most of those poor human beings had been brought to Treblinka, a death camp close by. Including Janusz Korzak, a famous Polish doctor, the first in his field to try and improve children´s lives. Allegedly, he rather went to the gas chamber with his entrusted orphaned children than agreeing to work with the Nazis (I found this story especially interesting because there was a Janusz Korzak school right next to my primary school and I never knew why it was named like that).

Later, after the Israeli-Arab six day war, those who where left of the Jewish community in Warsaw were made to move out of the country reducing the number of Jewish people living there to about 200 today. Let´s get this straight: 500.000 reduced to 200. What is wrong with humanity?

In the evening, we headed out for another amazing Polish dinner with potato cakes and sour cream, one more time Pirogi, and pancakes filled with sweet cottage cheese and cream.

Now I´m sitting here back in Berlin after another long night on the bus, with a cold and never wanting to go out anytime soon, but a great weekend behind me spent with a great person and friend by my side, having learned yet again more about the history and culture about a neighboring country and happy to be back with my lovely husband (and not so happy about being back to the studying for coming up exams)!

Poland on a Budget

How to travel cheap here – nie ma problemu! Lovely and comfortable hostel rooms are from 10 EUR per night (for example our Oki Doki Hostel is very recommendable and close to both center, nightlife and main train station). Buses get you there and back for 18 EUR one way, including wi-fi, movie screen on every seat and charger for phone or laptop in about 8 hours. A main meal of Pierogi is about 5 EUR – all in all I spent like 70 EUR this weekend, and that was including coffee and chocolate breaks and two times restaurant. Pretty alright I´d say :)