Yes! A warm and sunny day and we are in really vibrant Warsaw, Poland.
Our hotel is from a French chain, so decoration leans toward bright oranges and small rooms. Our hotel room would make any Jacques Cousteau feel right on board. It is small. Very small.
I regret not knowing Polish. 
The sign on the bathroom door warns about the hazard of wet floors. However, it is three lines long while the translation is not even half of that. Perhaps the Polish language says it more scientifically, or even as a politician would say it. It leaves me wondering if Fidel Castro, whose speeches often last all day, was not the sign writer here.
We begin with a 6:30AM breakfast because, sadly, we have only one day to be in Warsaw. We squeeze into a tram during morning rush hour, enroute to the old town. We pass the infamous Wedding Cake sky scraper built by Stalin at a cost of much money and many lives. From far away, the upper ornamentation looks appropriately like tombstones.
In a nearby gift shop, I see note paper with the Wedding Cake and an added graphic of an arrow, piercing the tower. I find no one who will comment on this, though street artists repeat the image in vandalized walls that are easily visible to the downtown public.
Our tour takes us quickly through the old town. 
We pause at large posters with a smiling Pope in front of Catholic churches. Our guide says that the locals like to say that the Pope was responsible for the Solidarity movement. We wait for the real attribution, but it doesn’t come. There’s no mention of Lech Walesa, albeit a strident Catholic himself, and the actual activitist for Solidarity who became Poland’s elected President and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
A decorated veteran of the WWII Warsaw Uprising travels to meet us at the museum. His grandson also comes to assist for translation. After a grand greeting, our vet was abandoned before he can address the group. I am confused, and later – so sad.
We are also told at the door to the Uprising Museum that the Jews of Poland left for Israel when it began to look bad for them before WWII broke out. (Seriously?) Actually, Israel didn’t form until 1948. Virtually all of the Polish Jews died of starvation or disease once interred in the Ghetto or forced enroute or imprisoned at Treblinka during WWII. Warsaw’s Uprising Museum covers this dark history with film footage and other documentation. In Warsaw, no Jewish settlement remains.
An ugly remnant of past hostilities sits on gift shop shelves: small wooden figures of Hassidim with a real coin fixed to the chest, a prayer shawl, and holding a money bag.
It is an uneasy, creepy, distasteful, and omininous series of impressions for one day.
Such is the ebb and flow of our travel days. We are amused by the banal, then in an instant, sickened by the sinister conundrum of histories, both national and personal.
notnyet 