{Apologies for the quality of some of the pictures in this blog entry; my phone camera was cracked and only worked when zoomed out! I have a shiny new phone now!)

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The King-to-be announced another British bank holiday for his coronation and immediately, my sister, cousin and I jumped at the chance for another whirl on Ryanair Roulette.

I pretty much did this when I ended up in Vienna in February, and we did it again for the May 2023 bank holiday, opting for the Polish capital of Warsaw.

My sister’s boss and my cousin’s friend are both from Poland and had both long espoused the coolness and culinary pleasures of Warszawa, so I was more than happy to book on and see what was in store!

After a rubbery, stale cheese baguette at a hen-party animated Manchester airport terminal 3, we ascended into aerospace and gabbed between ourselves until we drifted down into Warsaw airport where the staff barely even glanced at our passports, stock British smiles plastered across our tired faces as we passed the Polish frontier.

We had booked a cool, modern Air B&B situated in the hipster loft and thought it would be plain sailing after hopping in an Uber at the airport. Our Russian driver didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak his language, so when we parked up outside a rather grand, Greek-pillared hotel illuminated in golden spotlights, my sister and I momentarily thought that our cousin had booked us a curveball surprise. No, it was just a one-way street.

We exchanged a few questions and answers with him via Google Translate then alighted into the surprisingly chilly early-May midnight air.

We scoured around the locale with GPS, mobile batteries rapidly diminishing, and found ourselves circulating where the apartment was alleged to be a dozen times, dizzying ourselves and wishing we had packed a warmer jacket.

The cold began to nip and bite at our skin as we wheeled our suitcases along the road and trundled up some steps at the address where we believed we’d booked and everything online said was where we’d booked…. the number and street name and everything aligned but somehow we couldn’t gain entry with the code our host had provided.

We tried 700 combinations on the twist lock and NOTHING was giving. Flummoxed, we tapped numbers into the keypads on bar doors and apartment doors and shivered at every frustrating no. What on earth?

Finally, we cracked the code and gained access to a courtyard and traversed our way to the other side, tapped a few other codes into various doors and scaled stone stairs then somehow, nearing 2am, we got into what was to be our little Warsaw haven for the next three days.

We toyed with the idea of nipping into a bar for a very late nightcap as we felt so awake and wired after the flight and faff but we behaved ourselves and drifted off asleep until the morning light cascaded into our unveiled Velux windows.

Luke serenaded us awake with chilled 90s vibes courtesy of Dido, Lighthouse Family and Natalie Imbruglia which lulled us out of bed and into the shower, and dressed and ready to roam the streets and try a Polish breakfast at Vincent’s.

All three of us opted for the Warsaw breakfast which consisted of scrambled eggs with chives on sourdough, side salad with a gorgeous dressing, and toast with an apricot conserve not like any jam you get back in England. The cappuccino was beautiful and strong, which set us up for a day of exploring, starting at the Warsaw Uprising Museum.

Poland has sadly suffered numerous attacks on its people and land for nothing but in the names of prejudice, hatred and greed. We wanted to learn more so headed to the Warsaw Uprising Museum which presents the events of August-October 1944 when the Polish resistance Home Army lead an uprising against the German occupation of Warsaw. (Tickets cost 30PLN which is roughly £5.71 in GBP).

Most of the city was destroyed and thousands of civilians were killed in retaliation by the Germans. Hitler had been planning the destruction of Warsaw since before the start of WWII, wanting to wipe it out and turn it into a Germanised city.

Warsaw was rebuilt to resemble the old town as much as possible in the years 1945-1951. No monument was built to recognise the Home Army in Warsaw until 1989.

The museum is arranged in a way that assaults the senses as soon as you enter, with a disconcerting heartbeat metronome and no clear route. You make your way through each display as and where you can amidst the crowds, grasping at information (literally, as a great feature of this museum is take-away info sheets in Polish, English, and some other languages) as you go.

Excerpts from poems by Polish poets were stencilled and printed on the walls:

I didn’t take many more pictures in the museum as it was so crowded and in quite dark lighting, and I sometimes feel strange about taking photos of tragedies and suffering. However, it is crucial that we see this and learn from history.

It was fascinating and eerie to see soldiers’ chocolate bars, logbooks, bars of soap, bandage kits and more, preserved in glass cases under halogen lights. Weapons and aircraft suspended from the ceiling and videos of survivors speaking in Polish with English subtitles can only ever give us the tiniest taste of what they went through, and I can’t help but feel privileged and pathetic to observe such horrific artefacts of what others went through before us.

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Warsaw today has an industrial cityscape punctuated with beautiful nature with abundant trees, bushes, flowers and urban parks with plenty of green amidst the concrete grey, with an emerging hipster vibe especially over in the Praga neighbourhood over the other side of the Vistula river (more about there later).

We ran across the road in the rain to a lovely place called Food Hall Browary where they brew their own ales and serve international food, along with their own famous Polish pierogi (dumplings a bit like gyoza). The trendy red brick walls juxtaposed against gleaming wine bars and a stage for live music make for a great place to spend an hour or two in the afternoon, especially when waiting for the rain to pass.

We were booked on to a Polish wine tasting (I had no idea Poland produced their own wine- what a discovery!) that evening so we only had one in the afternoon.

We got an Uber over to Wine Bar Skorupki 5 where a friendly and knowledgeable man sat us down to a table with a plate of Polish cheeses (again, superb) and he told us a bit of the background of Polish wine and their nascent vineyards. Colder climes make for wine of a lower alcohol content and the new trend for ‘skin-contact’ wines is proving particularly popular in Poland right now.

If you haven’t tried skin-contact wine yet, it is hard for me to describe but it is an acquired taste to begin with; think along the lines of oaked white wines or more complex rosés. It is a great choice when it’s too warm to drink red wine but you want a taste that’s got a bit more edge than many whites. It is made by keeping the wine in contact with the white grape skins to macerate for a period of time, giving it an orange appearance (shades can vary from honey to bright orange).

We tried skin-contact, sparkling, white, rosé and red, each glass an absolute wondrous delight. The gent invited us to try some Polish vodka at the end of all of this and I would say, if you aren’t accustomed to it……… maybe don’t. That lethal libation is smooth to sip but downright ruthless!

The atmosphere was great in there though, with a great 90s playlist and one of the owners even invited us outside to watch him deftly saber a champagne bottle open, just for the heck of it.

The next morning, we were rudely awakened by this bold bird perched right outside the bedroom window:

After getting ready, it was time for a walk around Warsaw Old Town which is so quaint and cute; one of the prettiest European old towns I’ve seen. The buildings look direct from a chocolate box painted in dusky pink and light cocoa brown, lemon and rusty orange complete with gold awnings and mock engravings to replicate the true originals that adorned the façades before the war.

We were lucky with the weather after the rain of the night of our arrival. We had mild 20 degrees temperatures for the rest of our stay in Warsaw which was perfect for walking around. It is still advisable to bring a jacket in early May, but I’ve heard that it can get really hot from June onwards.

After buying a mandatory fridge magnet and strolling the streets for a brief time, we decided to search for a traditional Polish restaurant for lunch, and Luke found the perfect place: Gospoda Kwiaty Polskie (which fittingly translates as Polish Flowers Inn).

Inside feels like stepping into a grandparents’ kitchen with rustic decor and homely chequered table cloths, tealights and single-stem flowers in dinky vases. The staff were friendly and hospitable and were patient with us as we pored through the menu, using Google Images to see what the unfamiliar (to us) dishes might look like.

We shared a good bottle of Polish red and a starter of pierogi:

I also tried some Polish potato pancakes dressed with caviar, sour cream and dill. I was dubious about the caviar but it wasn’t too overpowering when eaten together.

After lunch, we walked over the bridge to the aforementioned Praga neighbourhood. Formerly of ill repute, this cool district was quieter than we expected, with graffiti on the walls and little pockets of grass and tulips lining the long, leafy avenues. Imagine a mix of concrete and greenery; a place just on the border of edgy and dodgy.

The first striking building we came across was St. Florian’s Catholic Cathedral, quite different in architectural style to those you tend to see in the UK and Mediterranean countries.

Reading about this cathedral later, I found out that St. Florian’s and other churches were used to hide Jewish people, the Warszawa army, and general civilians during the Nazi occupation. It was destroyed by the Germans after the Warsaw Uprising and was rebuilt with the help of the residents of Praga in the 1950s, finally reopening in 1972.

On our way to yet another natural wine bar, we passed another church, very different to St. Florian’s. Warsaw’s Metropolitan Cathedral of St. Mary Magdalene is the orthodox church of Warsaw. It is beautiful but small and enshrouded with trees so almost easy to miss!

We arrived at Restauracja Źródło in Praga where the owner, Adrian, presented us with a menu and passionately talked us through some of his best “beauties”, as he called them. He stocked one called ‘Kadarka’ by a Serbian winemaker called Maurer Oszkar, which is a natural, organic red wine made from the Kadarka grape.

It ‘only’ costs around £20 a bottle in the bar but is stocked in Noma, Copenhagen, one of the best restaurants in the world! (Temporarily closed). Besides the wine, the bottled water was the loveliest, freshest and crispest any of us had ever tried, a brand called Cisowianka that I wish we could get hold of in the UK! It tasted like drinking pure liquid cold crystal on a hot day.

Moving on from there, Adrian advised us to go to his friend’s Polish wine bar 10 minutes away, called Brać. More beautiful wine, more beautiful cheese. Brać had such a cool and local vibe, all the patrons except for us residents of the neigthbourhood. Several fluffy dogs milling around chair legs, lowkey music, humorous bar staff and friendly clientele made for a perfect little bar- we wished it was our local!

The next day, we checked out of the Air B&B and walked over the bridge again to the other side. We went into McDonald’s just out of intrigue to see what they had on their menu but did not buy anything. They had iced lemon espresso on the menu so I took a photo and sent it to my partner (from Italy) saying I had found the perfect drink for him just to troll him.

We stumbled across what we initially thought was a military base when we saw a fleet of tanks behind some railings before realising it was an open-air museum then we sought out somewhere cool for lunch, again by the river. Why are the best places always near the river? (Thinking Porto, Córdoba, Sevilla, Paris, and more). After plentiful cheese, we ordered Asian: udon noodles in a peanut satay which was yet again sublime. Every single bit of food and drink we tried in Poland was absolutely beautiful.

Sadly, we gave in to time and called an Uber to take us to the airport even though we gladly would have spent at least another full day in Warsaw.

My first time in Poland was an epicurean dream and a treat for the eyes.

I look forward to the next trip to Poland (or the next spin on Ryaniar Roullette!).