More Polish Misadventures

Before all the ass painting and fire-breathing tuba madness I had been speaking with my host at the mathematics institute about how sorry a mathematician I am. I'm kind of ok with that. At least I'm a good speaker. Well, with that rousing recommendation of my mathematical abilities I decided to set out and see some more warsaw.

I went to the nearest metro station, bought a 24 hour ticket and set out for old town. I accidentally overshot it and first went to the neighborhood immediately north of old town known as new town. Stare Miasto and Nowy Miasto. I navigated on instinct alone. I'd looked at a map earlier and was carrying a badly detailed tourist pocket map just for reference and just set out in the right direction. First thing, I saw a huge monument. Again, since my Polish language skills are close to nonexistent, I discerned that I was at a monument for World War II casualties and veterans. It was surrounded by an enormous building, super duper big (in area, not height) and I thought perhaps it was a museum, but that didn't make too much sense. I found out later (from a chilean consulate) that it is the ministry of justice. Go figure. I strolled through the new town neighborhood and realized I was slightly in the wrong spot and just turned south for a bit and wandered directly into a beautiful part of the city.

Stare Miasto is prototypical as an eastern european city. Colorful buildings, lots of big beautiful churches, lots of people eating at pubs and drinking copious amounts of beer. Walking around the not so big neighborhood I ran into lots of small things with big charm. Old town is also on the west side of the river that runs through the middle of warsaw. I walked down close to the river, and found some nice "forests" on either side. I guess they used to be forests, but there are still lots of trees adorning each side of the river, it's just that now they aren't the thick forests that they once were. Human settlement and a little thing called war took care of the forest density. I sat down at a small pub for a pint. I saw on the TV that some football match (soccer game) was happening.

Quick Aside: Football (as a sport's name) is even more confusing here than elsewhere since Warsaw has two soccer teams and an American Football team (called the Eagles, GO PHILLY! E-A-G-L-E-S). I didn't bust out any e-a-g-l-e-s here, because I didn't think they'd understand what the hell I was doing. Besides, the match was between the two warsaw soccer teams. Turns out it was the Polish first league and a fairly important match. But to my understanding it was sort of a yankees-mets or cubs-sox or rangers-islanders or jets-giants or galaxy-cd chivas type rivalry. That is to say (for the less sports educated readers) they don't like each other very much. But to me, polish first league soccer isn't terribly interesting. I'm gearing up for USA-England on June 12.

I finished my (first) pint and wandered around. I walked through a very residential area of nowy miasto and saw two kids on bikes. They weren't really kids so much as people my age, but they WERE on bikes and they WERE speaking english. Turns out, one is from the states and the other from chile. The american had something to do and so split immediately, but I asked the chilean (who speaks rather good english) if he wanted to go for a beer.

First things first. We heard loud cheering and wanted to go see what it was. Turns out, it was the same soccer game (football match) that was airing in the pub. Some kids across the street from the stadium had a nice half stair-case from which we could look into the stadium. So with my new found chilean friend and a crowd of random people we watched about 20 minutes of the big game.

So, now with a traveling companion we set out to see some warsaw. It turns out this guy from chile has been living in Poland for close to a year and is a consulate. He works with the embassy here. He also told me that there are 50 Chileans living in all of Poland. I guess his job is not REALLY taxing when it comes to visa issues and such. Don't get me wrong, he works harder than I do, but it seems the amount of travel from Poland to Chile is rather minimal, and looking after Chile's citizens in Poland is probably not as difficult as say, looking after tibetans in india...

So we went for some food and drink. Stopping along the way to eat Shawarma and sausage and drink a beer across the street from the mourning place for Poland's recently passed president. We paused to pay homage, and then drank. I'll drink one more for the president before I leave.

He told me he had to go to the gym since it closes early. And we agreed to meet close by at 10 PM. That gave me more time to wander around. By the way, I'm not getting very good use of my 24 hour pass. But it's ok, I saw about 6 neighborhood of warsaw that were new to me.

At 10 we met again and wandered around. He shared with me some fantastic chilean pisco (he was shocked that I knew what it was and liked it) as well as some really fantastic mexican mezcal. Didn't think I'd see either of THOSE in poland, but then again, I didn't expect to see a fire-breathing tuba either. The rest of the night BASICALLY went as usual. A little pub crawl, talking to random folks in languages I don't really speak, drinking beer I don't really like, and walking home after the train stops running. Off fore more misadventuring!