The day after the Berlin Marathon, we hopped on a plane to Warsaw, Poland. It was the first time visiting Poland for the both of us, and we diligently studied the Lonely Planet to orient ourselves and determine our plan of attack.

We stayed for two nights in Warsaw in a studio apartment not too far from the Old Town Square, rented out by a company appropriately enough named Old Town Apartments. I loved staying in a real apartment, as opposed to a hotel, and we had a full bedroom/living space, separate kitchen and dining room, full bathroom, and separate foyer all to ourselves. Quite the deal, I think.

And it was a good thing we stayed in the beautiful Old Town section of Warsaw, which was carefully reconstructed after World War II, because we weren’t too impressed with the architecture and surroundings of the rest of the city. The Nazis destroyed 85% of the city after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and then the Russians moved in and rebuilt. Sorry, but 1960’s Russian architecture is just not that attractive, especially in the cold and rainy weather we visited in.

Our first night, we went to a bar near our apartment, and immediately met an extremely drunk Polish man who has lived in Austria for the last 20 years or so, and spoke English and German. Good thing too, because neither of us knew a word of Polish. Over the course of the evening, we heard this man’s life story — more in German than English, the more he drank — how he was back in Warsaw to visit his father, who had survived the concentration camps during World War II, but was now dying of old age. In the lighter moments of the conversation, D was able to squeeze a mini-Polish lesson out of him too, which served us well for the rest of our trip.

During our only full day in Warsaw, we wandered around the Old Town, toured the reconstructed Royal Castle, toured a museum or two, got miserably lost, had a cocktail at the top of the Mariott Hotel to check out the view, and went home.

The next morning, we hopped on a three-hour train to Krakow. But that’s another post! For our Warsaw photos, click here.

More posts about our trip to Poland:

• Visiting Krakow
• Auschwitz-Birkenau