This sentiment on the wall at the airport appealed to both of us. Maximum predicted temperature for today 14 deg C - and showers.
The progress through immigration is slow and the train into the city also. My notes said to take the S3 line but we could only find the S2. No help from signage (absent) nor from the single rail official we found; fellow passengers were in the dark as much as us, with much getting off, back on, off again, on again from everyone - would have been funny if it wasn’t so exasperating. My singleton image of the train network on Dropbox on my i-pad finally yielded some clues to our addled brains, re-affirming my notes that we should take the S3 but indicating a Plan B: take the S2 and change at Zachodnia and this would put us onto the S3 line. More lugging of bags up and down stairs when we got to Zachodnia which was a bleak-looking place. There does not seem much money for infrastructure it seems; and it is all somewhat forlorn-looking.
Eventually we arrive at the Centralna station (with escalators!) and walk about half a kilometre to our VERY NICE Hotel Polonia (nice early modernist architecture). This was the only hotel left standing from the rubble of WW2 and a grand old lady she is.
Talking of ‘grand old’, news just in is that Bob Hawke has died.
Poland has a tragic history of war, Holocaust and Communist occupation and a long tradition of resistance against the encroachments of the Swedes, Russians, Prussians and Germans and at one time (1795) disappeared from the map altogether. In WWII, the Nazis murdered 3 million Polish Jews and 3 million other Polish civilians who they designated "subhuman Slavs".
We have just an afternoon and a night in Warsaw before taking the train to Krakow. We return to Warsaw at the end of our trip, again for an afternoon and a night before flying home.
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