Warsaw 1991 #1of5

As we approached Warsaw from Gdansk, we were on twenty miles of a four-lane divided freeway. There must be a better word to use than bragging, but what else do you call it when I can recognize the skyline and other checkpoints of Warsaw, and determine where we are, even though we have no map, and were never on the northern part of the city during our two days here, six years earlier. Well, Emmy was my only audience at the time, but now it’s been engraved in these Travel Tidbits.

That doesn’t mean I’m perfect, the street I tried to use to get to the campground was blocked by construction, and a miss-turn found us in front of the main train station. That turned out to be OK, as we stopped and bought a street map, and determined from a “discussion” with several Taxi drivers that the campground is in fact where we thought it was. The cabbies looked in our Peugeot RV, and were happy to meet Americans.

We found Warsaw’s campground and camped in the exact same spot as in our previous visit. During the night we were awakened by some noise, heard a large dog, then heard more noise than we thought necessary. The next morning the people next door said that during the night they heard someone trying to unscrew the fuel cap from their vehicle. The campground guard came with his dog, but they found no one.

A lot of effort has been spent to make the old town district in Warsaw look just like it had before the war. We could see remnants of the old city wall, but we don’t know if that portion survived WW II, or if the remnant has been rebuilt to match a remnant from before the war.

When we had visited here the other time, the old town had been almost empty of people (both visits were on a sunny Sunday afternoon), and all we bought that year were some smuggled bananas. This time, street stands had bananas, oranges, and fruit of all kinds, and in good quality and quantity, and there were people and cars galore in the marketplace. Street vendors were selling paintings and postcards, and there were artists who would draw or paint pictures of people, while they waited. As one little girl, in a Mickey Mouse hat, was having her picture painted, I mentioned Disneyland, and the girls mother said, “We were there last year.” Now that was a surprise.