After a long trip back to Warszawa, the bus dropped everyone off at the prestigious, five-star Le Meridien Hotel Bristol, situated near Old Town and next to the Presidential Palace (their version of the White House). Well, everyone except me! I didn't know that everyone was staying there, so I opted to save a few bucks and had reservations for the Sheraton Hotel, which was about 15 minutes away walking. Ewa was going to be taking everyone out to eat some Polish pierogis in a bit, so I hopped in a cab and headed to my bastion of American capitalism, the Sheraton. Usually I hate staying at these places, but I do enjoy using my points and earning more free stays. Plus, there were very few Americans in Warszawa I had gathered, so that would ease the pain a bit.
At 4:30, I had walked back to the Hotel Bristol and met up with the group again. We headed towards Warszawa's beautiful Old Town (Stare Maisto) and stopped into a restaurant along the way. There were about fourty different types of pierogis, but Ewa told us there were only three "traditional Polish" types. After the table had spent about fifteen minutes trying to organize all twelve of our orders for sharing and what not, the waiter then told us "oh, we don't have these mushrooms or this cheese", etc. In true Ewa-style, she went ahead and gave the waiter an earful about how he should have told us before, but he didn't seem to care. Customer service just isn't the same thing in some of these places! In any case, I got a combo plate with all three traditional pierogis and the Russian-style, which had sounded the most boring to me (onion and potato filling) sent my senses into orbit! They had a serious onion kick to them and were fabulous.
After dinner, some of the people headed back to the cocktail party at Brendan's parents' suite at the Hotel Bristol and some of us headed further down the road to Old Town. Much like Prague, Old Town is brightly colored with lots of yellows and cobblestone streets. There was a castle at the edge of it that we hadn't even noticed because there was so much going on there. Apparently the original Old Town had been destroyed, like most of the city, during WWII, but had been reconstucted using pictures of the old city. We actually came across a monument later on during the day that honored the Polish Uprising of 1944. With the Soviet Red Army across the river and the Germans on their way out, Poland gathered about 50,000 troups to form an army to try to kick out the Germans once and for all and setup a stable national government before the Russians occuppied the country and installed their communist ideology over the Poles. The uprising soldiers had expected the Allied army to help them defeat the Germans since they we
re just across the river. Sure enough, the Russians decided to stop their forward movement and let the Polish duke it out with the Germans alone, with no support of any kind, including weapons, bombs, ammunition, etc. So the Germans quickly dispatched some Panzer tank units and SS special forces to the city and swiftly defeated the Poles. Hitler was so irate about the uprising that he ordered the whol city to be razed and all civilians to be killed. 85% of the city was destroyed and 180,000 citizens were killed. All of this on top of the fact that 50% of the population had already been sent to concentration camps because they were Jewish.
In any case, we enjoyed or little stroll around Old Town, visiting the square, eating ice cream, and exploring a city that none of us really knew anything about. We leisurely strolled back to the hotel to meet up with everyone for one last time at night in the hotel lounge to have a few cocktails, find out where everyone else was going, and say our goodbyes. I checked out early and headed back to my hotel so that I could get up at 7:00 the following day and tour the city with Kevin from Cleveland a bit before my 5:00 flight. Besides, I had a busy week ahead and I needed some rest!
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