Warsaw is a fairly ugly city. The Old Town, which is what I photographed while I was there (images posted here), is very pretty and quaint, but the rest of the city – Centrum, the business district, the shopping district, pretty much every place that wasn’t a park or Old Town – screamed “Ohai, I’m a communism and I humped these buildings real good!”.
Apparently, if you want to see a picturesque city in Poland, you go to Krakow. I didn’t go to Krakow. The first time I was in Poland I was meeting a friend in Warsaw, and the second time I was there for work purposes (also in Warsaw), so no picturesque Krakow for me. But whatever. I can appreciate that Warsaw was, at one point, completely levelled. I can appreciate that they had to rebuild the city after WWII, and that their Old Town isn’t actually old at all. It, along with most things in Warsaw, was rebuilt after the war ..
On both occasions I stayed in the city centre near the Palace of Culture and Science and, having wandered around the city, the one thing that came to mind (aside from how ugly some of the buildings were) was how sparse the city felt. There aren’t a lot of skyscrapers, there’s no congested metro, everything feels quite spread out. It reminded me of a map I worked on in Sim Town where I kind of went “herp derp” and just started randomly placing things everywhere instead of creating some sort of dense urban hub. It was weird. Coming from France, where everything is so compact and cramped, even in a small city like Bordeaux, Warsaw was a city with a lot of space and seemingly not a lot of ideas with what to do with it.
But hey, I really like Warsaw! It’s a cool place.
I came back recently during winter for a Witcher 2 press event and the city was very different. It felt much less touristy than it did during the summer, the temperature was -4 degrees instead of low +30s, and my heat sweats were replaced with cold panic sweats. (Also, meat sweats from all the meat that I was being fed.)
So yeeeeeeeah. Warsaw. Do eeeeetttt!
