Sunday 8th June

We had breakfast & went off to find the local Aldi closed but singing coming from the church next door to the hotel. We went in to find a choir, 2 soloists & a baroque orchestra part way through a Bach Cantata so we sat down. The music was very moving & the players must have been professionals or very experienced amateurs. A Eurasian young baritone soloed on one part & then the complete ensemble finished the work. The church was lined with photos after it was wrecked in the war & has an austere interior after its rebuild. From there we walked into a nearby park & admired fountains & play areas full of people jogging, pushing prams & sunbathing on the grass.
Returning towards the hotel we had a couple of terrible coffees but got on to internet access at last. Our 4 star hotel wanted us to pay $18 a day for wi-fi, which we thought was a terrible cheek.
We packed up & left at mid day to catch the train to Warsaw & were surprised to find that it went from a large suburban station. It arrived & left in about 4 minutes with us in a first class compartment all to ourselves but it was extremely hot with substandard a/c so we sweltered until we crossed the Polish border where we waited whilst they changed engines. Come home buses, all is forgiven!!! After about 25 mins we set off again but now we were at the back of the train not the front.
The rest of the run was pure hell as the compartment just would not cool down & we were desperate by the time it reached Warsaw. It was a short drive to the hotel & after a meal we went to bed.

Monday 9th June

Had a latish start after a great breakfast & were picked up in a minibus for a tour of Warsaw. This was well organised as we started in the palace grounds of the former king of Poland. It was built in the 18th century as a summer palace & the grounds are well tended. It had a lovely statue of Chopin & the palace itself was surrounded by water. From there we moved on to the Jewish Ghetto memorial in an area razed completely in 1943 after they rose against the Germans. It was redeveloped in the Communist era with massive blocks of apartments but beside it is the Museum of Jews in Poland which we visited later.
We crossed over the Vistula River, at 1000km the longest in Poland, running north from the Carpathian Mountains to the Baltic & saw the huge football stadium before returning to the west side of the river passing the Memorial to the Warsaw rising of 1944 into the old part of the city which also has been completely reconstructed, based on paintings of Canaletto. We walked around the old town & saw, amongst other places, the birthplace of Marie Curie. One church had been used in the rising as a hospital & when the Germans overran it they just blew it up, entombing the patients.
Another more recent memorial was to those killed when the Russians invaded Poland 19 days after the Germans in 1939. Poland has had a very unfortunate history as it has been occupied by other nations for the past 200 years.
We stayed on in the old town & had some lunch at an oddly run cafe,before walking after a few detours to the Jewish Museum, which is a wonderful building although the exhibits are still being developed. Again we found it somewhat confusing but they had an excellent video showing scenes of life from the 1920s. Warsaw had 400,000 Jews before WW2, constituting 30% of the population. They were forced into the ghetto & were shipped to Treblinka in 1943 before their uprising. A tragic history, yet again.
We took a cab back to the hotel & after a rest had an incredible meal at a cafe next door. An early start tomorrow so an early night is in order.