Vilnius vibes

We spent a lovely long weekend in Vilnius. After such a stressful journey, the thing Lucy and I most wanted in the world was a G & T and Rob thankfully obliged. Dumping our bags at the hostel, we headed out to explore Vilnius and find somewhere to eat, before heading back for a well deserved night's sleep.

The first thing to say about Vilnius is that it doesn't feel like a capital city at all. We were staying on a quiet road next to a stream which was only a 10 minute walk from the centre and yet it felt like we were out in the country. It's Baroque churches are what makes Vilnius famous, but what makes it so cool for me is the atmosphere; where else would you get a district declaring itself a republic and forming its own constitution with such gems as "Everyone has the right to die, but this is not a requirement"? Our first full day was spent exploring this district, called Uzupiz, before heading up to explore some of the Baroque centre. The plan to do much exploring was thwarted by the fact that it was Labour Day and so there were a huge procession going on. (At this point we were terribly English, and despite not having a clue what was going on, clapped very politely and tried to join in with the singing, somewhat unsuccessfully.) There was also a massive Taize convention, so we had to keep an eye out whenever we went into any of the churches to check we weren't about to end up in the middle of a service.

After the beauty of the centre of town, it was rather a sudden shift to go to the KGB museum, but it came highly recommended as something one must see and I suppose there is never a good time to see something which is so upsetting. It is a museum based in the old KGB headquarters, where people were sent for anything remotely constituting 'anti-Soviet' behaviour and has a large section on the fate of those transported to Siberia and other areas of Russia. What you realise is that whole families were sent, often without any charges being confirmed and that until these settlements had established themselves, the chances of the children surviving the vastly different temperatures was minimal. Another very moving collection was the embroidery with various messages about their homeland and the fight for independence and a rosary made out of bread. The bottom floor of the museum has been maintained as the prison it was when still the KGB headquarters. The isolation cells and execution cell are obviously pretty horrendous, but it was the padded cell which really threw all of us, which is where they put prisoners after torture. It was certainly well worth seeing, although I do worry that on this trip Lucy and I are perhaps becoming a bit numb to such horrors; so much inhumanity happened here in the 20th century, that I'm almost expecting to discover it in every new place that we see.

St Weronika, Patron of Hapless Travellers

Leaving Poland proved to be a more difficult task than we had thought. After saying goodbye to Helena on Thursday morning, we were next due to meet Rob in Vilnius on Friday afternoon, so had over 24 hours to get from Poland to Lithuania. An easy task, you might think. Our initial plan was to take the overnight bus from Gdansk to Vilnius - a ten hour stint, but attractively cheap and with no changes - but we found out that this only ran alternate nights, and of course, not the night that we needed to travel. So we decided to travel 5 hours back to Warsaw and take the overnight bus from Warsaw to Vilnius. Here too we were thwarted. That bus also only runs alternate nights - and not the night we needed. You would think that it would be organised so that there was always a bus running overnight from Poland, either from Warsaw or Gdansk....but that would just make too much sense. With the aid of the Thomas Cook railway book (the Bible of the road), we worked out that we could get to Vilnius by Friday evening if we caught the 7.25 from Warsaw and changed at Sestokai, just over the Lithuanian border. However, this left us stranded in Warsaw for the night.

And so it was that Weronika received yet another phone call from Damsels in Distress and came one step nearer to canonization by having soup and pasta waiting for us when we arrived at 10pm. It was a short but, we hope, sweet visit, as we were off again at 6.30 the next morning to get to Warsaw Centralna. We were a little early (alright, half an hour) but we were absolutely determined not to miss that train, as there probably wouldn't have been another one for several months. Once we were on the train, we thought that the drama had ended. No such luck. We then had to decipher Polish announcements about which part of the train to sit on depending on where you wanted to go. Cue much heaving of bags up and down the train and general confusion. The train then proceeded to run half an hour late, meaning that we would miss the one connection that day from Sestokai to Vilnius. Stress levels had reached fever pitch when we arrived at Sestokai and raced over to the other platform where the train was about to leave.

I have never been so relieved to arrive at a place in my life. Vilnius certainly likes to be elusive. Odd for the biggest capital of the Baltics but I suppose it keeps out all but the most determined travellers. Here endeth the Saga of the Two Maidens and the Polish Public Transport System.

The Polish tour continues

We decided to break the journey from Warsaw to Gdansk at Torun, a medieval university town famous for gingerbread and Copernicus. In fact you can buy a gingerbread Copernicus there, which admittedly was chiefly what we went to Torun to do. It's a beautiful town with the characteristic main square with a magnificent town hall in the middle and lots of places to sit out in the sunshine and drink beer. We chose a cafe next to a statue of a violinist surrounded by frogs (the Polish version of the Pied Piper story) and whiled away a couple of hours until our connection to Gdansk very happily.

The train (approved by Helena for its Poirot-esque compartment carriages) got us into Gdansk at 9pm and we took a rackety taxi to the hostel which looked like a ruin from the outside but inside was very cosy and clean, and a great base to explore the city centre, as it was just a ten minute walk away. I think we were all pleasantly surprised by Gdansk the next morning. I for one had been thinking of heavy industry, shipyards, revolutions....all of which are certainly important in Gdansk, but it is also remodelling itself into a very attractive tourist town to rival Krakow with a completely restored main street and square and a lovely river front lined with restaurants and amber shops. But it manages to keep its own unique character and is fiercely proud of its recent history. However, it has to be said that it was something of a disappointment to Sarah as it is not in fact on the sea, despite the deceptive appearance on maps. Helena had been gently hinting as much for the last three days but to no avail. So the dreams of fish and chips on the beach will have to wait for the time being.

We spent the morning mainly wandering through the Old Town and buying amber, at which Helena proved herself to be remarkably decisive, and I to be quite the opposite. After a beer and a highly dodgy hot dog, we headed for the Roads to Freedom Exhibition which is about Solidarity and the end of the communist regime in Poland. It's an excellent exhibition, very inspiring, and it made our subsequent visit to the shipyards much more meaningful. Seeing the soaring monument to the fallen shipyard workers was very moving when you realise just how much it meant to have successfully erected it. The famous gates of the shipyard, where many of the demonstrations were staged, are still covered in Solidarity posters, crosses and pictures of John Paul II (as well as one of the current pope). But it is also very much still a functioning place; as we arrived the workers were leaving for the day and casting curious looks at the girls taking pictures through the gates. What struck us all was how incredibly recent all of this is - we seem to be catching up with ourselves time-wise as this trip goes on.

The day finished with a fish supper sitting on the waterfront and surveying the mix of tourist and industrial boats that line the river: quite indicative I suppose of the point that Gdansk is at. It was sad to realise that this was our last night in Poland. Or so we thought......

Chopin's fingers

The following day we decided to head over the river to Praga, the only district of Warsaw not completely destroyed post the Uprising. It was apparently the area used in the filming of The Pianist and it certainly seems much more crumbly than the Old Town; you can still see bullet holes in buildings and everything looks much more run down. It is cool primarily because there are absolutely no tourists there (the nudist we passed we assume was a local) and so you get to see a bit of Warsaw life by just wandering round without bumping into someone else taking a picture.

After a coffee in a local cafe, we headed back to the Old Town to find somewhere nice to eat and found a lovely restaurant overlooking the Main Square. Lucy and I have found that it is a distinct advantage having people come out to see us, because we can justify having a beer or eating out far more than we would otherwise! After a very lazy lunch, we walked along the Royal Way and found an English bookshop to restore Lucy's ever-depleting supply of reading material. A quick pop into two churches, one of which is the resting place for Chopin's heart*, before heading to meet Damian.

Damian is Lucy's Aunt's friend (I think I got the connection right), who agreed to show us round the Lazienkowski Park, and absolutely stunning park with a beautiful Palace on the lake, lots of peacocks and a beautiful open air Chopin theatre. We spent a lovely few hours chatting about everything from politics to Warsaw before heading back to Weronika's for pasta and pesto. It was more successful than the veggie stirfry, but this might have more to do with the delicious Moravian red rather than any improved cooking ability. Another enjoyable evening spent chatting to Weronika, before we packed up and got ready for yet another early start.

A massive thanks at this point to Weronika and her grandmother who made us feel so incredibly welcome. It was lovely to actually stay in a home rather than in yet another hostel and to be able to get some real local insight, so hope Weronika sees this and that the red wine is helping with the exams xxx

*Given the ongoing fight between France and Poland about who can claim Chopin, we've come to the decision that the deciding factor should be who owns his fingers...does anyone know which country does?

Well I would walk 500 miles....

To our amazement, Lucy did make the 8 am mass and looked ridiculously cheerful for that time in the morning. Helena too was an early riser, so I was left holding the flag for the people that can't think straight until at least 9 am. We had a leisurely breakfast with Weronika before heading out on the metro to the Old Town. Our first port of call was the Warsaw Uprising Monument, a collection of sculptures of people emerging from the rubble. It was right outside what we assumed were the courts, a strikingly modern complex of buildings, which framed the sculptures beautifully and was, I think, a fitting tribute.

After that, our wander took us through lots of little winding streets to the Old Town Square, complete with a fountain with a mermaid on it which is the symbol of Warsaw for some reason. The buildings were of course largely destroyed after the Uprising but have been beautifully restored, so that they look very like the old pictures you see of this area on postcards. The old centre was absolutely heaving with people, especially families who were indulging in the most amazingly tall ice cream cones you have ever seen and given that an important aspect of this trip is immersing oneself in the local culture, we decided to follow suit.
Following our 'immersion in culture', we headed into the Royal Palace to explore. Again it was completely devastated during the war and wasn't rebuilt for decades afterwards. It houses a beautiful mirrored room where concerts are held, as well as a series of rooms that depicted different eras of the royalty of Poland. It was interesting to see just how many of the portraits were either the same as or relations of the portraits we had seen in Vienna. You get a sense of just how inter-related the royal families of Europe were.

We lunched in one of the many beautiful parks in Warsaw, the Saxon Gardens, watching all the people out for a Sunday stroll. Warsaw feels very family centred, as well as incredibly safe and was definitely a city which was stealing our hearts. We could have stayed sat in the sunshine for the rest of the afternoon, but instead had madly decided to walk to the Uprising Museum, out in the business district.

It has been a failing of ours on this trip, that we have sometimes failed to acknowledge the fact that distances on the map, even when you know the scale, can look much smaller than they are. This was our mistake trying to get to the museum; it took hours and as 4 o'clock came around and it just came into view, we had the awful premonition that we were about to discover that Poland operates early closing times on Sunday. Thankfully it didn't and we got a couple of hours to explore what turned out to be an amazing museum.

The museum itself works chronologically through the beginning of war to the aftermath of the Uprising. It is brilliantly done with lots of visual and auditory aids. Particularly moving for me was the section about the Home Army, the men and women who fought against the Nazis and were prominent in the Uprising itself. After the war, the Soviets (who incidentally had refused to come to the civilians of Warsaw's aid, despite being just the other side of the Vistula) tried to undermine the significance of the Uprising and the importance of the role of the Home Army in a spectacular retelling of history in which it had been a pointless sacrifice of civilian life by the thoughtless ruling class. It was only after the fall of communism that the musuem was able to come into existence. Also deeply moving was the role children, particularly Scouts made to the Uprising, carrying messages and equipment to the Army. Most of those who survived were sent to camps afterwards, when Hitler ordered that the city be destroyed.

Knowing what a long walk back it was to the centre of Warsaw, we attempted to catch a tram, but not realising how to get tickets, we had to jump off and walk the several miles back. We felt that after this we probably deserved a beer and sat in the early evening sunshine, looking out towards the Palace of Culture and Science. Feeling refreshed, we headed back to Weronika's who was most amused at our catastrophic attempt at veggie stirfry, which managed to fill her entire house with the smell of burnt broccoli, not our finest culinary moment...

Getting to Warsaw

Well we did make the train and even managed to pick up lunch supplies with our incredibly limited Polish - we keep getting pitying looks from the old ladies whenever we try and pronounce 'apple' and 'two'. The five and a half hour journey was spent with me trying to read Kafka (I think that life may be too short...) and Lucy re-reading The Pianist as she has now read through absolutely everything we brought with us and requires a re-stock in Warsaw.

We arrived at about 4, outside the enormous Palace of Culture and Science (a gift from the Soviet Union), and headed to a cafe to wait for Lucy's friend Helena to arrive. A restoring sandwich and coffee later, we heard from Helena and gave her directions to reach us. It was only after half an hour had passed and she had still failed to arrive that we thought there might be a problem and discovered that there are multiple black fountains and little parks around the Palace, and poor Helena was stuck looking for us on the other side.

Once we were all assembled, we headed up to the Old Town, beautifully restored since its total destruction after the Warsaw Rising for an initial wander and were struck by quite how stunning it was. We found a lovely little restaurant for Pierogi and a catch up, before heading to the supermarket to stock up. After standing in a queue for hours we were finally stocked up and ready to find Weronika's house, where we were staying.

Having said that we would be there by 9 and with no way of contacting her to let her know that we were going to be late, we were slightly panicked at the discovery it was going to be nearer 10.30pm by the time we got there. However, we finally made it and were made to feel very welcome and comfortable by the lovely Weronika, who even managed to persuade Lucy to attend the 8am mass the following morning (Helena and I shared somewhat astonished expressions...)

An American in Wroclaw

Leaving Dresden horribly early in the morning, we caught the train to Wroclaw, our overnight stop en route to Warsaw. We've now got these early mornings sussed; neither of us speaks to the other until we have a coffee/food and are capable of being civil as neither of us are what could be termed as 'morning people'.

We arrived in Wroclaw, in Southern Poland just before lunch and had time to settle in to the Cinnamon Hostel (think joss sticks and a slightly bohemian atmosphere) before we were meeting up with Beth, one of the girls we met in Olomouc. She is an American teaching here and offered to show us round.

Like many cities on this trip, Wroclaw has belonged to many different people at different times and was part of Germany during the war. Although over 70% of the city was destroyed in WWII, it has been beautifully restored and was a wonderful place to spend an afternoon. Beth showed us round the old town; the Rynek (market square) with a big flower market, lots of cool jewellry designed by local art students and the University with its beautiful Baroque church, before taking us to the undercover market with a milk bar where we got to soak up the local atmosphere. Everyone eats with everyone and it was here that I got to try Pierogi, the famous Polish dumplings with a yoghurt drink you are supposed to have with it.

After a wander round the market where we tried the local gingerbread, Beth took us over to the islands on the river Odra, which is where the Archbishop lives along with many religious orders. From the top of the cathedral we got a fantastic view across the whole of Wroclaw. After a walk along the river, we headed back to the square for some yummy ice cream and coffee, before going back to the hostel to get ready to go out that evening.

Beth and Maria (the other girl we met in Olomouc) took us out to a lovely Italian restaurant by the river front where we chatted about politics over a bottle of wine, before heading to a jazz bar. Finally we realised that it was pretty late and that we had an early train to catch so we headed home so that there was at least a chance that we might make our train.