An Easter Weekend History Lesson in Warsaw

Sharing some interesting vegetable juice and a condensed Polish history lesson at the Boutique B&B.
Hot chocolate at Belle Epoque.
Searching for remains of the Ghetto Wall in the former Jewish Ghetto.
Sitting outside in the Old Town Market Square with a beer and sausage plate.
Walking around Lazienki Park on Easter Sunday, which is busy with families, peacocks and red squirrels.

Quick Tips:

We had a wonderful time in Warsaw but unless you have a special interest in their Easter celebrations, I would recommend visiting outside of a holiday weekend. As I mentioned before, the museums we wanted to visit closed their doors for the entire weekend, a fact that their tourist information office seemed to be unaware of!

If possible, try and keep bank notes of small denominations for buying snacks or small meals. On more than one occasion we found ourselves waiting ten or more minutes for change from a zloty note that wasn’t worth much more than .

If you fly into Warsaw, the owner of our B&B recommended arranging hotel pick-up service so you don’t end up paying more than you should for a taxi into the city centre.

Best Way To Get Around:

Warsaw is definitely a good city for walking, especially when there are so many monuments and points of interest to stop and look at.

We didn’t use the metro system because we couldn’t find a place open to buy tickets (and you can’t buy them at the station, which seems ridiculous!) However we did use the bus and the tram, both of which were very cheap and easy to use.

Having underestimated the distance from the railway station – it’s not far at all, but with big bags, getting a taxi is a good idea – we dragged our heavy suitcases and sweated our way to the Boutique B&B on ul. Smolna.

We arrived at 8pm and were greeted by the prolific owner, Jarek. Within the next hour, he had given us his opinion on the Second World War, Chicago (where he lived for a long time), and drinking natural vegetable juices as a treatment for cancer. We tried a couple, one carrot, which was pretty good, and one made from sauerkraut, which may be the worst smelling and tasting concoction in existence. It was certainly made for a very memorable welcome.

The B&B rooms are scattered throughout a couple of buildings on ul. Smolna, but each room (we got to peak at three others besides our own) has been carefully restored and decorated and has almost any utensil you might need for a short or long stay.

Our room had a comfortable and spacious living room area with cable TV, a kitchenette with dining table and fridge, and a clean, bright bathroom with towels, soap, shampoo and hairdryer.

The kitchen served breakfast every morning with fresh tea and coffee and a generous assortment of cheese, meats, fruit, yogurt, bread and jams. On Easter Sunday we were treated to an assortment of Polish cakes on a table decorated with eggs, chicks and other seasonal accessories. Another nice thing about the kitchen set-up is that it forces you to interact with other guests, making it easy to get recommendations on where to spend time during your stay.

Across from the kitchen is an office open for guests to use computers with Internet access, free of charge. There are also no shortage of books and maps, which Jarek will happily share with you. And if you’re thinking of visiting other parts of Poland, ask Jarek. He made us wish we’d had more time to spend in his country!

One thing to be aware of is that if you don’t pay by credit card in advance over the Internet, payment is cash only. Fortunately there’s an ATM within 1-minute walk from the B&B but it’s something to bear in mind.

Finally, the Boutique B&B is in a great location, situated almost midway between the old town and Lazienki Park. It’s on a quiet street too, so you’re very much guaranteed a good nights sleep.

www.bedandbreakfast.pl

Just beyond the Barbican, in Warsaw’s New Town, you’ll find the Belle Epoque café. Even if the food were bad here (and it’s not), it would be worth visiting for the eclectic décor. I felt like I’d stepped into the boudoir of a 19th century French actress. The interior is softly lit, and is simultaneously intimate, decadent, and sumptuous.

The real winner for me at Belle Epoque was the hot chocolate. I implore anyone who visits Warsaw to try their hot chocolate, even if Europe is in the middle of a summer heat wave. It was warm and syrupy but not too sweet. We also tried some cottage cheese dumplings and a crepe, which were also delicious. Adding in a cappuccino our bill came to $20.

Almost next door to Belle Epoque is this diminutive coffee shop. If you want to get a seat here you either have to have good timing, or be prepared to wait for a while for one of the 5 tables to open up. This is a popular meeting spot for old and young alike. It was recommended in our guidebook and is probably one of the few places in town where it could take you 10 or more minutes to decide from which part of the world you want your coffee to come from. The menu is extensive but I eventually settled for a Papua New Guinea blend with a slice of dense cheesecake on the side.

The wooden cosiness of this one room café makes you feel like you’re in the cluttered kitchen of a good friend who just happens to be a stellar barista. All the coffees here are carefully hand crafted in antiquated coffee-making contraptions (some of which decorate the front window sill). And if you want some to take home, you can visit the adjoining shop and purchase your own bag of beans.

To be honest, we only stopped by for a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie – that’s about all our budget would stretch to at the Belvedere. We knew its reputation as one of, if not the most expensive restaurant in Warsaw so we hadn’t planned on staying for a full meal.

For location, you can’t complain about being in the middle of Lazienki Park. The building is the former conservatory to the palace, but with the abundance of foliage, you wonder who’s winning the competition for space, the restaurant or the plants. The hip side of the restaurant, close to the entrance, is less green and more red and black in colour.

The coffees and pie were good, although not so outstanding that I’d say it was particularly memorable, but the food that glided past us to the main dining tables looked pretty fancy to say the least. Our small order came to $21 so I’m guessing that a full meal would set you back $100 at least.

This was one of the few restaurants that we found to be open the night before Easter Sunday. It also happened to be at the end of ul. Smolna, about 2 minutes walk from the Boutique B&B where we were staying.

We were at Sense for dinner and although we left around 11pm, the bar side of the place looked set up for people to hang out and drink until the small hours. The restaurant side looked like an enclosed side street, with brick walls and a cobbled street floor. There’s also a subtle attempt at a north-African theme, which contrasted with the trendy, urban feel of the bar itself. The futuristic toilet stairwell was impressive, constructed with glass and bathed in blue light.

I had a really good carrot and ginger soup followed by teriyaki fish and chips. It seemed like an odd meal to have in Poland but it was actually pretty tasty and the service was excellent. At $57 for two x two course meals with wine, it wasn’t the cheapest option in town, but it’s certainly not a bad place to go if you’re not in the mood for traditional Polish fare.

www.sensecafe.com.pl

On Easter Sunday, the two places that seemed to be the most lively were Lazienki Park during the day, and the Old Town Market Square in the evening. We took an outside seat at Stacja Rynek where things were gradually livening up. There were various street entertainers around, including an organ grinder, a guitarist and a very young break dancing duo.

We ordered a sausage plate and a couple of beers ($16 total). We were lucky that the weather was quite mild so it was comfortable enough to sit outside and watch people go buy. The Old Town Square has somewhat of a theme park feel to it, probably due to the fact that whilst the buildings are old in style they are new in construction, having been rebuilt after their destruction during the Second World War. Stopping at one of these outdoor bars, it’s nice to sit with a guidebook and read about the history and present use of each building in the square.

To the south of the former Jewish Ghetto area, along the slightly shabby Panska Street, you’ll find the newly opened Ice Bar. You can either drink in the room temperature, white-plastic looking front bar, or pay the cover charge to enter the real Ice Bar, where almost everything is made out of ice. The staff loan you fetching silver capes so you can brave the constant –8 degrees Celsius temperature. And as obvious as it sounds, it’s flippin cold! The capes are adorned with various tacky sponsorship logos but come with nice fur-lined hoods to keep your head warm.

Finlandia vodka of various infusions are served up in ice shot glasses but once you’ve downed one or two shots, there’s not much else to do except leave the bar and get warm. It’s probably a different story late at night on the weekends, but I wouldn’t recommend visiting the bar any earlier than 9pm.

I think ice sculpting is under-rated so I was keen to see what they had done with this place. I have to say that overall I was somewhat disappointed. For starters, the bar is really small. It takes all of a minute to admire the 4 or 5 ice sculptures, and with all the sponsorship posters slapped on the wall you feel like you’re part of an expensive marketing gimmick. In addition, the location in the middle of a rundown row of shops seemed really awkward and it had little cool factor (excuse the pun).

www.icebar.com.pl

On our first day in Warsaw, we decided to explore the former Jewish Ghetto. Our guidebook mentioned so many memorials, monuments and other points of interest in this area that it seemed wrong to bypass it.

We took some time at Zamenhofa, where the park is home to the striking Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. From here you can follow the Path of Remembrance, a series of 16 granite blocks, commemorating the 450,000 Jews who were murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto. It seemed unfortunate that the park itself isn’t that well kept, and it’s circled by a group of dilapidated apartment blocks.

A short walk south (about 5 minutes), on the edge of Krasinski Gardens you can walk along ul. Bohaterow Ghetta. You wouldn’t know to look at it now, but this cobbled street used to be part of Nalewski Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in the Jewish quarter. The guidebook advised us to look out for bullet holes on fragments of the remaining walls, and sections of tramlines that were left in the cobblestones. These silent wartime leftovers make you stop and think about what life used to be like in this area. The dead-end street and adjacent park were grey and a little depressing, but the constant hum of traffic nearby grounds you in the present – obviously a more preferable era to be living in than the 1940s.

From Krasinski, we continued further south for another 30 minutes until we reached Chloda Street. From here, we walked down Walicow Street where you can see parts of the Ghetto Wall and a few buildings that somehow survived the war but are now in severe states of disrepair. The wall was built by the Nazis to contain Warsaw’s Jewish population. In this small area, most people were either left to starve to death, or taken away to concentration camps.

One interesting stop for us was at 55 Sienna Street where a stretch of the Ghetto Wall borders a courtyard of an apartment block. There’s a small plaque on the inside of the wall, which is the only obvious clue to the wall’s history. You have to keep an eye out for these signs as many of them are discretely marked, if at all. Somehow though, the lack of advertising makes for a more rewarding and poignant experience.

Jarek, our host at the Boutique B&B recommended this park and seeing as our guidebook had dedicated almost two whole chapters to the park, we decided to follow the advice of both parties.

We started at the western end of Poniatowski Bridge, on al. Jerozolimskie. From here we walked south, stopping by the Sappers Memorial, which has quite an impressive approach along Prusa Avenue. Our guidebook didn’t really explain it’s significance though and even after Internet searches I’m still non the wiser! We noticed many families out and about and the day definitely had a holiday feel about it.

We walked back along the avenue and up to a viewing terrace just below Frascati Street. Walking along Frascati you pass Poland’s Houses of Parliament to join Piekna Gornoslaska. We passed John Lennon street (!) and entered the north gate of Ujazdowski Park. This park is quite small and manicured and a neat introduction to Lazienki Park proper, which is a wonderful park to spend a day exploring. It’s not a bad idea to have a decent map of the park to ensure you don’t pass by sights such as the dramatic Chopin monument and the Palace on the Water. From here you can also access the Belvedere restaurant.

The park was filled with couples, children, peacocks, ducks, and red squirrels. We enjoyed viewing the Chopin monument even though it overlooked a dry pond (and not a lake as our guidebook had informed us.) Just opposite the Palace on the Water we stopped at a food stall for a gaufre with cream and tinned fruit cocktail for $2. The menu was in Polish only so we pointed to an item and hoped for the best, and despite the lack of fresh ingredients, it was quite tasty!