History and more frustration in Warsaw, Poland

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If a city disappoints you on its first day, it’s nice to be able to give it a second chance. After our negative experiences in Warsaw yesterday Masayo and I were looking forward to today. After all, it’s Monday, not Sunday – maybe the crowds would be smaller and maybe we would be able to find our way around. Maybe I could avoid blood sugars in the 300s.

On that last point today would be successful. As for enjoying Warsaw – well, it was better than yesterday but devolved into a maddening mess by the afternoon. Again.

Unsurprisingly after the chaos of yesterday, my BG was 222 when I woke up. Breakfast was stuff we bought at a small market last night — doughnuts, yogurt, and even packets of instant coffee we made in the room’s kitchen. (True coffee has been hard to find; every supermarket we’ve been in for several days only has 3-in-1 coffee/sugar/cream packets, yuck.) I hoped my Humalog shot would be enough to set me straight and clear my head for the day.

We planned on walking along a route through town we’d seen on a tourist map, which passed several places important to the story of Jews in Warsaw during World War II. Such a walking tour seemed like it would reveal to us something of the senseless and shocking death of Warsaw’s heartbreaking twentieth century.

We took the Metro from Polytechnika to Ratusz Arsenał station — and everything worked. We bought tickets from the touch screen; a train came; it let us off, all as expected. Why couldn’t yesterday be this smooth?

It was a little chilly and overcast as we began our walk. We followed the map and found several interesting sites, including The Museum of the History of Polish Jews. We weren’t planning on going in and it was just as well: a long line of people snaked out the door and way down the plaza in front. I was surprised by such a crowd on a Monday morning in November; this was supposed to be the quiet season for tourism here. Maybe something special was going on today. Anyway we couldn’t budget the time to check it out ourselves.

The walk itself was nice, going through quiet residential neighborhoods, and I felt that we were getting a much more flattering peek into Warsaw than yesterday. The monuments and sites were stark and sobering – places of suicides, secret headquarters, and train plazas that carted people hundreds at a time to Nazi death camps. This wasn’t that long ago, a few decades.

After stopping in at a little record store, where I did my usual treasure hunt for Ray Charles (found an LP, though not one I wanted), we were hungry and started looking for lunch. At a road that looked like it had a lot of shops we walked about 2 km up and down but all we saw were ugly bank buildings and shut-down or grimy-looking kebab places that didn’t appeal.

Finally I noticed that a liquor store (“Alkohole”) that doubled as a cafe. There was a single table in a corner, separate from the larger liquor part. The lady there spoke English and was very helpful; Masayo and I each got pieces of raisin bread and coffee. Before eating I checked: 188. I still felt low, though I clearly wasn’t. Psychology messes up my dosages; I took what I thought was probably not enough Humalog.

After this small snack we broke from the map route to check out Pawiak Prison museum; it was closed though. Apparently, today a movie was being shot there. Catering trucks, a “makeup bus”, and audio/visual trucks were lined up outside. I saw a woman, presumably a starring actress, being led into the makeup bus. Someone seemed annoyed that I was taking photos, perhaps mistaking me for someone who knows and cares about Polish celebrities.

So we walked on; way down the road there is a vast park and Jewish cemetery but it too was closed, with a large forbidding iron door. (Why would a cemetery be closed?) Rebuffed at every turn, we turned left to go see something we were both really looking forward to: the Warsaw Rising Museum, which everything we’d read warned us not to miss. It would tell the story of the valiant but failed uprising by residents of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 against the Nazis.

At the museum we were again surprised to find a long line of people waiting to get in. I assumed we could just stroll right in. “Low tourist season” wasn’t living up to its billing. We stood in the slow-moving line for about 45 minutes, getting tired already. Our only lunch had been the raisin bread. It was also getting very cold.

We finally bought our tickets (at twice the price we were expecting — they were 14 złoty, a posted 7 zł price being only for members of large tour groups). But then there was another line to actually enter the Warsaw Rising Museum, and it too moved at a snail’s pace. Selfish people without tickets were holding places in front of us while their friends waited in the ticket-buying line; serves us right for doing things by the book. The door guy was only letting in a few people at a time; frequently he’d stop the line altogether to let large tour groups go ahead. It was a maddening scene.

By the time we actually got in, Masayo and I both felt terrible. I know it sounds whiny now, but we were really shocked by what we were seeing, and we’re not at all your typical demanding, bitchy tourists. It’s just that everything in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania felt so smooth and easy and well-thought out. Warsaw was frustrating at every turn; it was quite a stark difference.

Just inside the entrance, I suggested in all seriousness that we just find the exit and leave. My head was spinning, and I know Masayo was having a hard time standing up. But we decided to stay, at least a little.

The first thing you see in the museum is a row of 1940s-era telephones; you pick one up and audio plays. The exhibits in the museum are very well-designed, conveying the feeling of a bunker during war time. Concrete, iron, and torn netting were the decorative themes.

The phone I picked up had music playing through the earpiece but I didn’t understand what it was. The problem with the Warsaw Rising Museum was that it seems to assume a lot more pre-knowledge than we possessed. There were English explanations here and there but still everything was out of context. There was no basic overview of the uprising to start you out with. When was the uprising? What was the context? What happened? I never did find out at the museum.

It was pretty crowded, as families, big unaware people in passageways, and hyperactive kids ran all around. We sat down to rest. Masayo seemed to be barely functioning so I gave her one of my low BG candy bars so she’d have some energy. While she ate I checked my finger: 232. Fitting, I thought grouchily, and opted to leave it as it was. A museum run this poorly deserves a bad blood sugar. I didn’t even get a selfie with it.

In fact we ended up spending about an hour at the Warsaw Rising Museum, learning nothing except that rusted old guns look cool in the right lighting. (NB: Later in the evening I checked Wikipedia and learned far more about the uprising than I did at the museum.)

Outside the museum we hopped on a tram bound for Centralna. Again we wanted to pay someone but again didn’t see how, and again nobody seemed to care. At Centralna we got off – yet another free ride we didn’t ask for and didn’t earn. Warsaw, you’re weird.

We were hungry and it was only 6:00 — surely something would be open for dinner tonight! We walked the 1 km back to our neighborhood, talking about the Vietnamese restaurant on the corner near our room that we were planning on going to.

We arrived and made our choices from the menu outside, then went in. As we stood in the doorway the Vietnamese-looking guy behind the counter said something to us in sharp, unfriendly Polish, then said in English, “closed”.

Closed? It was obviously open – an older guy was sitting there eating, and the sign said it was open until 9:00 on Mondays. It was now 6:30.

But what could we do? We walked back outside, dumbfounded and still hungry. The older guy who had been eating also exited, speaking to us briefly in bemused Polish before ambling off down the sidewalk. It was all so bizarre; Warsaw continued to disappoint.

But dinner turned out pretty good in the end: we returned to a Bulgarian restaurant we had passed called Varna who were open, and the food was excellent. I had a pork cutlet stuffed with mushrooms, onions, and cheese, plus salad and rice and a drink called ajran, described on the menu as a traditional Bulgarian yogurt drink. It was salty and went well with the pork.

I ate everything on my plate – even all the rice. Rice and insulin often don’t get along that well, so I took what I thought was a large shot, right at the dark table through my Bluff Works pants.

My BG afterwards was 249. Not great but hey, not in the 300s!

After dinner I tried to find transportation to Gdańsk for tomorrow but got annoyed all over again, this time at the clunky, confusing ticketing websites. I’d fill in my to and from stations and the date, and the search button would open another website where I’d have to do it all over again. Eventually I’d finally find tickets I wanted but then the “Buy” button would be greyed out with an unhelpful message like “carrier does not allow you to buy tickets”.

So I gave up and watched yesterday’s Atlanta Falcons game on NFL Game Pass. That I enjoyed – we won, and it calmed me down. Then I managed to buy tickets from PolskiBus to Gdańsk tomorrow and made hostel reservations through booking.com.

Finally we made some small plans for Warsaw tomorrow morning before we leave — one site we want to see in the southeast part of town. One more chance for Warsaw to redeem itself, to show us something compelling of its troubled history and its promising present.

Our second day in Warsaw was nearly as aggravating as the first, despite more bright spots. I’m not sure how much Warsaw itself is to blame — maybe we’re just expecting it to be as easy and welcoming as the other places we’ve seen so far. But to be honest I felt annoyed and betrayed and I couldn’t wait to leave. The city seems nice at first, but I’d have to say I felt sorry we’d come to Warsaw at all. I’m sure many love it, but it seemed a bad fit for us.

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