Warsaw is Poland’s capital and biggest city. It’s huge, famous, and important…but not particularly romantic. (If you’re looking for Old World quaintness, head for Kraków.) But Warsaw is an inspiration to visit. To think it was literally bombed flat and rebuilt since 1945 is amazing.
Walking through Warsaw’s parks, enjoying a little Chopin in the composer’s hometown, marveling at its fast-growing skyline, and just connecting with big-city people who are as warm and charming as small-town folk — that’s the fun of Warsaw.
Poles love America — they think of us as their big brother from across the Atlantic. And when the communist government gave the people a small opening for representative government in 1989, the “get out the vote” poster was Gary Cooper holding not a gun, but a voting card. The result of that election: Anticommunist parties won every single seat the communist party offered up for a vote.
I spent my first evening in Warsaw at the Chopin Salon, an intimate evening of beautiful music, wine, and cheese hosted by Jarek Cholodecki, who runs the recommended Boutique B&B. Each evening, a small group of locals and travelers gather around Jarek’s big, shiny Steinway grand to hear great music performed by talented young artists in a great city. It felt “very Warsaw.”
Warsaw’s massive Palace of Culture and Science skyscraper, dating from the early 1950s, is the tallest building between Frankfurt and Moscow (760 feet with the spire). It was a “gift” from Stalin that the people of Warsaw couldn’t refuse. Varsovians call it “Stalin’s Penis.” (There are seven such “Stalin Gothic” erections in Moscow.) If it feels like an Art Deco Chicago skyscraper, that’s because the architect was inspired by his years he spent studying and working in Chicago in the 1930s. Because it was to be “Soviet in substance, Polish in style,” Soviet architects toured Poland to absorb local culture before starting the project. Since the end of communism, the younger generation doesn’t mind the structure so much — and some even admit to liking it for the way it enlivens the new, predictable, glass-and-steel skyline springing up around it.