Monday July 21
After the meager breakfast at the hotel, we met our guide
Kris for our half-day tour of Warsaw. We started with a walking tour that was
to take us to the Old Town with the Royal Castle, the Royal Route and Lazienki”
– the Royal Park & Palace, the area of the former Jewish ghetto, the Saski
Garden and the “modern face” of Warsaw. We were to have the afternoon free to
explore on our own and we had planned to visit the Warsaw Uprising Museum.
In the lobby he asked if we were Polish or Jewish and when
the answers were no, he seemed mystified about why we would visit.
Kris was a nice guy, but a PHD has no business doing tours. Most
guides have an “in a nutshell” kind of style and if you have questions you can
ask. Kris was non-stop history & dates for 7 hours, which was more than we
could handle. We prefer to see things, take photos and get the "general
idea of a place". We even mentioned that a little bit of history goes a
long way, but the “guiding style” didn't change. Standing and hearing a lecture
for 15 minutes or more and then rushing by the thing you came to see isn't a
great experience for us. (we did just stop and take photos) Kris was also a
“close talker” and he had to be right on top of you and looking you in the
eyes. We even tried just walking away
while the lectures were happening, but Kris followed us to make sure we didn't
miss anything he said. By the time we got to the Old Town I felt we rushed
through there after spending over an hour not a block from our hotel before
moving on. OK, I looked at the times of the photos and what seemed like an hour
was only 15 or 20 minutes. Still too long to stand in one place and listen to a
lecture. If we wanted the history of Poland since the dawn of time we could
have taken a college class or just looked it up on the internet. We’d prefer
actually going into a building and seeing it rather than spending the time
outside being told about it.
Joanna Rajkowska is a Polish contemporary artist who came onto the Polish art scene in the 1990s. Her most famous work is called "Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue", a 49-foot artificial palm tree installed on Warsaw's Jerusalem Avenue. It wasn’t removed after the exhibit and instead become under the protection of the President of Warsaw. We stood at this intersection for 15 minutes listening to him comparing the building styles.
We finally moved on towards Nowy Swiat - main historic street on the Royal Route.
We spent quite a bit of time at Staszic Palace, the seat of the Polish Academy of Sciences with the statue of Copernicus. Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer and mathematician who proposed the heliocentric theory of the solar system, making him known as the "father of modern astronomy". His theory placed the sun at the center of the universe, with the Earth and other planets revolving around it, a revolutionary idea that challenged the long-held geocentric model.
We visited the Church of the Holy Cross which was an interesting visit. Frédéric Chopin's heart is still preserved. It was removed during an autopsy after his death in Paris and taken to Warsaw, where it is now encased in a jar filled with alcohol and placed inside a pillar in the Holy Cross Church. The heart was examined in 2014 to determine his cause of death, which was believed to be complications from tuberculosis.
We continued on to Saxon Garden where the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier has a changing of the guard every hour. It was a lovely park, and we had to push Kris to keep walking to see the fountain. If it wasn’t history
oriented, he wasn’t interested in showing it to us. (doesn’t everything
have history?)
Our walk took us past the Presidential Palace and closer to
the Old Town. It was almost 1:00 and we were hungry and dying of thirst. At no
time did he ever consider that we may want a restroom break or refreshment. We
asked if we could stop and grab something “quick” (since our tour was to be
over and we hadn’t seen half of what was planned). We stopped at the first place
we came to and got sandwiches. We chose a table, and I went inside to use the
restroom and when I came out our table had changed, and Kris was sitting with
us. We were hoping for a break from his talking. I thought maybe he would talk
a bit like a person and not a lecturer at lunch, but it didn’t really change.
He did tell me that his PHD was in some minute thing with linguists. (studying
the nuances of various languages) He said his thesis may have been of interest
to about 12 people. He has taught some classes but says it’s not rewarding.
Refreshed & fueled we were on our way to the Old Town.
On the way we saw where Marie Curie did some of her early research.
St John's Archcathedral is the mother church of the
Archdiocese of Warsaw and one of Poland's national pantheons. Along with the
old city, the church has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
After walking through the Old Town, we took a taxi to the Warsaw
Uprising Memorial. We’re thinking that since the Uprising Museum is there that
this finally the end of the tour, but he said it was closed, and the museum stop
was later.
Next, we grabbed a taxi to Umschlagplatz of the Warsaw
Ghetto. Umschlagplatz (German for a collection
point or reloading point) was the term used during The Holocaust to denote the
holding areas adjacent to railway stations in occupied Poland where Jews from
ghettos were assembled for deportation to Nazi death camps. In 1988, a memorial
was erected in Warsaw to commemorate the deportation victims from the
Umschlagplatz. The monument resembles a freight car with its doors open.
We continued the walk through the ghetto past the 16 stones
on the Pathway to Remembrance and encountering a Jewish Group meeting in the
park. They said Shalom as we walked by. We stopped at a small grassy hill that is
the monument and commemorative stone dedicated to those who perished in the
bunker on Ulica Miła during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
We enjoyed the museum, and it was well done. Laid out nicely
and in chronological order.
When we finished the museum, we discussed what we should do
with the rest of our evening. We felt like the Old Town was the most
interesting and we could easily find dinner there. We got an Uber and walked
the Old Town at our pace retracing some of the same areas from earlier.
In our opinion our
hotel should have been located near here instead of where we were. We got an
Uber back to the hotel to pack up for our train ride to Krakow tomorrow. It was also our opinion that the tour could have been finished in the 4-to-5-hour tour as scheduled instead of 7 without the verbose tour guide.
Warsaw City https://photos.app.goo.gl/cSywggkjHqhFmLch9
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