Tuesday 28th February

I woke up about an hour early before we arrived and looking out the window everything was white with snow and/or frost. It looked cold!

We arrived in Warsaw around 7:10am and located the ticket office to book our next train to Kiev as we cannot use our interrail ticket any more. Thank god after only 5 journeys it's already in ruins! The lady that served us spoke what I wouldn't even consider broken English. Hand gestures and writing down times comes in handing for this job! We have managed to get our tickets which leaves at 15:30 tomorrow and arrives a day later at 10:40am! We have beds on this train so won't be too bad but still…! Hopefully we'll get a better night sleep!

It was pretty darn cold when we walked out the station I found out later it was -4c! Cold! Our hostel 'Oki Doki' was only a 20 minute walk which was fine. I previously made a comment regarding the area surrounding the train stations looking run down, this was instantly taken back. The area was clean, modern and not in any way dodgy looking! It kind of surprised me! We weren't sure what we were expecting from Warsaw but it has outdone our expectations for sure.

We found our hostel the building itself confused us, as on the right was a bank and the left was security business of some sort. We did eventually work out we just had to walk straight up about a 1000 flight of stairs. Both Stu and I have agreed to live in a bungalow…!

The staff let us have a shower and store our bags for us while we went out. We had walked about 10 minutes down the road when I noticed it was trying to snow. It practically snowed all day. We went off to have a look at the ghetto hero's monument. During the war the German occupied Poland created these ghettos to keeps all the Jews. The Jews weren't allowed to leave these ghettos and no one was allowed to help them either. This created famine and diseases spreaded quickly. A lot of Jews died in the ghettos, after a short while the Jews were eventually sent to the concentration camps and died there.

Next to the monument they are currently constructing a new museum, the Jewish Museum; the museum opens next month unfortunately! It sounded like it will be really good! I am tempted to go back to check it out!

We walked back and headed into old town square. This was pretty much destroyed during the Warsaw uprising. Warsaw has re-built the area to look like it used to, it has been done well. We walked past the castle and across the river. Being in pretty much open land we got pummelled pretty hard with the wind and snow! The other side of the river was the district of Praga. We walked through the park and to the zoo. Pretty random day, but it was good. Most of the animals were inside but we walked inside and could still see them. It was the most deserted zoo I have ever seen! It was a pretty big zoo by looking at the map; we got really cold and extremely hungry so we left in search of food. We walked across the bridge; the snowing had eased a little which was good. We found subway and hid in the warm for a bit where it started to snow more.

We trudged through the snow back into our hostel and checked in. we needed to get food for dinner so I made the great excuse to go to the nearby shopping mall to check it out. It was pretty big, something I didn't expect Warsaw to have. It was in the 'modern' end of Warsaw and was pretty fancy! If I wasn't on a budget I would have had a field day!!

We had an early night as we had disturbed sleep again on the train and the fact we needed to check out at 10am again!

Wednesday 29th February

Most museums are closed on a Monday, but no, the Warsaw Uprising museum was closed on a Tuesday! We headed over there as it has been rated very good. It didn't disappoint! It basically described about the WWII and the effects it had on Warsaw. It has some pretty grim pictures of people being shot and killed, it wasn't very nice. But I guess it wasn't nice at the time either. The museum was amazing; it had a massive monument in the middle of the museum, a big black wall that had the sound of a beating heart to remember all those lost in the war. It also had random bombing noises throughout the museum as well, which was pretty loud!!

There was so much information it was very hard to process, but I did pick up all the leaflets it had to offer to do some homework reading! I got this extract from the Warsaw uprising website:

"The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 — a heroic and tragic 63-day struggle to liberate World War 2 Warsaw from Nazi/German occupation. Undertaken by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), the Polish resistance movement, at the time Allied troops were breaking through the Normandy defences and the Red Army was standing at the line of the Vistula River.

Warsaw could have been one of the first European capitals liberated; however, various military and political miscalculations, as well as global politics — played among Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) — turned the dice against it.

This site is dedicated to all those who fought for their freedom in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 as well as all those who, as civilians, perished in the effort."

There is a lot of detail and day to day timeline but if you would like to read up further: http://www.warsawuprising.com/

They also went into a lot of details about the actual war as well, it would have been nice to have gone round with a guide as it had so much information I couldn't process it all!

The museum also had a Replica of theB-24 Liberator which was pretty cool! You would have loved it Dad and Paul!!!

We stayed at the museum for about two2 or so hours and returned to the hostel to catch our next train to Kiev. We had a sleeper train and had to catch the train from another station. The staff scared us at first as they said they thought this was a metro and not a main station. Luckily they were wrong and our train did leave from here! Our carriage was an old Russian sleeper carriage; it was old and smelt old. It also was possible the hottest thing I have ever experienced! It was so uncomfortable! We shared our booth with a lovely older Ukrainian couple. The man spoke very broken English and we had a basic conversation with him. It was quite nice. He helped us with how everything works on the train and it was very sweet of him!

We had to go through border control, first the Polish border, which was fine. The guard came on and scanned our passports and went off. However the Ukrainian border was scarier! They even had a sniffer dog! They came on and took our passports off and I guess to their office! I started worrying that we needed a visa, luckily after an hour or so we got them back. This whole process took 2 hours to get through!! Good practice from the Vodka train I guess! But we got our first passport stamps! Woo!!

Overall view on Warsaw:

Warsaw surprised me, what I had imagined in my head was not what I saw! I really enjoyed Warsaw, I would love to come back and have more time to explore the city and all the museums it has to offer. Despite having been completely destroyed by the war, Warsaw has done well to reconstruct the city as it was before the war. I would love to explore further afield from Warsaw and it has been bumped up my list to re-visit again at a later date I hope.

Total miles travelled from UK: 1898

Transport taken:

Trains = 7

Hours ahead of UK:

+1

Our Photos:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150830017328986.511956.501883985&type=3&l=f01b57e85e