![]() ![]() The Old Town itself takes up quite a bit of the town centre and, after a while, knowing that the vast majority of it is a facsimile, you end up trying to spot which bits are truly old and which bits aren't. According to our guide, 84% of Warsaw was flattened by the Nazis, and in the years afterwards, the Poles painstakingly recreated their original Old Town, or at least the building façades. Ages ago, I was talking to Maciej Cegłowski and he was talking about how Warsaw has the newest Old Town in the world, and now I see what he means. Warsaw itself is a divided city, with many ugly blocks of flats and office buildings built since the war, and then the charming Old Town, built, as it happens, since the war. Luckily for us, we stayed mainly in the tourist area, where everyone spoke English and the menus were bilingual. We ended up getting a pan-European phrase book, which covered about a dozen languages in precisely no detail whatsoever. We looked for one at Luton Airport, but although the book store there had loads of Swedish guides they had nothing Polish at all. Sadly, I didn't have either my Poland guide book nor my Polish phrase book, both of which ended up getting left in Dorset when I moved to London, just because of a lack of space. Really good guide who gave us a lot of information about the city that we would have had to dig for online otherwise. The EBU and Polskie Radio put on a guided tour for us on Friday afternoon, which was great. T'Other and I were in Poland for the European Broadcast Union's Radio News Specialised Meeting, which I'll talk more about on Strange Attractor, and decided to stay a couple of extra days to see a bit more of the city than simply the interior of Polskie Radio. The trip has been just great, excepting a slight bout of sunstroke on Saturday (I'm a fragile little thing), and I'm sad to be going home. Sitting in the crappy bit of Warsaw airport – Terminal Etiude, where EasyJet fly from – waiting for our flight home. (Started writing this on Sunday night, but didn't get the chance to finish it yesterday.)
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