After nearly two years grounded, I've been back in the air. Unfortunately, Clare isn't with me because my trip to Poland has a certain novelty to it: I'm not on holiday. Not really, anyway. I've recently signed up for a three-year, part-time postgraduate course, part of which entails me being in Poznań next week. I decided to fly out on the Saturday morning, giving me bit more time here, and so here I am in Warsaw. This might be a bit of a gamble: Clare and I were very briefly here in 2009, travelling from an Esperanto event in Czechia to another in Białystok, via a short stopover at Warsaw's Centralna train station. Both experiences convinced us that we didn't like Poland, and so, except for a brief visit I undertook with some family members in 2019, we've consciously avoided Poland since then.

Travelling to the airport was a doddle. Having left at 04:30, I pretty much had the motorway to myself. I did have cause to be worried: signs were up saying that the M1 was closed between junctions 14 and 15, and that there was a 30-minute delay between 15 and 15a. The thought did enter my head that I didn't have a lot of leeway regarding timings, and I left at junction 16 intending to bypass the closed part via A roads. I changed my mind within a couple of minutes, realising that this wasn't the time to take risks: better to be late but on the correct road than to gamble with a longer, circuitous route. As it happened, I never did leave the M1 once I'd rejoined it: the bulk of it was limited to 60 mph, and it reduced to a single lane for a stretch, but it wasn't actually closed, so I made it with lots of time to spare.

That was a good thing too because the Wizz Air section of the departures hall was carnage, with lengthy lines. As it happens, I got lucky about 30 minutes into the wait: an assistant, who had earlier been calling out the names of Romanian destinations to usher those passengers to the front, switched to Warsaw, and I was able to jump to the front of the line. After that, everything went exceptionally well, except that there really wasn't enough time to get breakfast, with 30 minutes to go until final boarding. (Of course, they hadn't even started boarding once that time arrived: there wasn't yet a plane for us to climb into!)

Wearing a mask for the duration of the flight wasn't the bother that I thought it would be, and it was an entirely pleasant experience. I didn't spot a single person reclining their seat, and there wasn't the pointless rush at the end to race out, grab luggage from the overhead lockers, and then stand around aimlessly, all squashed up. The flight appeared to consist almost solely of Polish people, so presumably that's a cultural difference. I did spot one group of English people: they joined the EU queue at passport control. Perhaps they've been asleep for the last five years.  I joined the queue for the rest of the world: one quick glance at the vaccination certificate on my phone, and my passport was soon bearing a new stamp.

After that, I withdrew some cash and took a taxi. The host here has been exceptionally helpful, and so I knew the street address to get dropped off at: the apartment is on a pedestrianised section, so this wasn't the taxi's destination, but the host had provided me with a map from the drop-off point. And what a notable drop-off point it was:

A-ha: the instructions did indeed mention a monument being in just this spot. It's the Pomnik Jana Kilińskiego; Jan Kiliński Monument to us. He commanded the Warsaw Uprising of 1794 against a Russian garrison stationed here. He looks as though he meant business:

Behind him stand the city walls extending from the 16th-century Warsaw Barbikan:

 My journey was short and simple from here. All I had to do was walk up the small street which Kiliński was guarding, and within a couple of minutes my own street crossed it. Ulica Piwna, where I'm spending the next two nights, boasts some beautiful buildings:

There were some beautiful colours as I approached the stretch where the apartment is:

I was too early to check in, but the host had invited me to sit in her café until the hour came. No problem: look at how pretty it is!

I assumed my suitcase would be too bulky for inside, so took a seat outside. There was a touch of rain, and one of the staff members invited me in. It turns out that the café is larger than I thought with several rooms, and I took myself to the corner of one with floor-to-ceiling bookcases:

Everything was running late because the cleaner hadn't turned up, so the host started cleaning the apartment herself before escorting me across the road to it. It's a perfect base with a living room and kitchen:

And the bed looks as though it's going to be luxurious!

I settled in, arranged to meet a friend and his wife, and did a little bit of exercise in the meantime, before heading out to the restaurant my friend had reserved us a table at, which was only a couple of minutes' walk away. I got there slightly ahead of schedule, not realising quite how near it was, and so made myself comfortable whilst waiting for them:

And then we spent a few pleasant hours in each other's company before heading our separate ways. Warsaw is much, much nicer than our disagreeable experience in the underground section of the main railway station led us to believe!

The first mission of the day was to source some breakfast. Poland is a very Catholic country so I wasn't sure that any shops or restaurants would be open. Except for one: the one bearing those famous golden arches. It turns out that there was one only a short walk away.

My street happens to come straight out onto Castle Square:

The buildings in Castle Square really are easy on the eye:

The apartment is located on this street between these two colourful blocks:

There was some sort of demonstration nearby, around Sigismund's Column:

Once breakfast was sorted, I went back to the hotel to have a bit of a lazy day, ahead of a later adventure. You see, I'm in Warsaw, the home of Esperanto, since this is where Ludoviko Zamenhof lived when he published the first book in the language in 1887. I'm an Esperantologist, so there were some streets I wanted to track down.

I left in the afternoon, and the restaurants on Castle Square had brightened themselves up with some lights:

I headed off in the direction of the Barbikan, and soon found this rather strange statue:

It's the Pomnik Małego Powstańca, a monument honouring child soldiers:

And before long I glimpsed the Barbican in the distance:

It was  a sixteenth century fortress which was largely destroyed during the Siege of Warsaw in 1939 and the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. What we see now is a rebuilt version, hence its apparent newness:

The nearby streets are full of colourful buildings:

They realy are delightful:

And they go on for quite a distance:

I realised I would have to turn off before I ended up too far off track, so turned onto a main road, where I was met with a sight I hadn't anticipated:

They were following a black car which had a police escort. Something didn't seem quite right to me: the uniforms seem to be from decades past:

And my suspicions were confirmed when I saw the women:

I presume it was either a historical re-enactment or something being filmed, although I hadn't spotted a camera crew. I seemed to have chanced upon a hotspot for commemorating the Second World War:

This is a monument to the Warsaw Uprising:

I crossed the road to walk through the gardens of the Krasinski Palace and found my first bit of unexpected Esperanto on a signpost for hired bikes:

That's the Esperanto word for vehicle, and it was immediately in front of the palace, the front lawn to which was the territory of a collection of winged horses:

I went around the back of the palace to walk through its grounds:

It really is a splendid building:

And it brought me out right where I wanted it to:

Alongside Zamenhof Street you'll fine a monument to the Warsaw ghetto:

And on the same site stands the enormous POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews:

And so I decided to go into this gargantuan building to see whether my Esperanto detective skills would turn something up. There are extensive exhibitions spanning 9 different galleries.

I'd seen plenty of beautiful artefacts, including these paintings of Frederick William II, Emperor Franz II of Austria, and Catherine the Great:

But there didn't seem to be any Esperanto-related displays. And then my eagle eyes caught sight of something familiar in the distance:

"That's the house in Białystok in which Zamenhof was born", I thought to myself, and I approached it. One quick glance seemed to confirm it:

And then I spotted a relevant passage on a board:

Success! But could I find more?

It turns out I could. And all I had to do was mind the steps as I headed down a flight of stairs: 

This led to a map of the ghetto on the floor:

Although I was going around as fast as I could, there was a one-way system in place and the exhibition spanned several floors, so I spent more time in the museum than I intended to. I needed to resume my route: I was off to Nowolipie Street, where the firm which printed the first Esperanto book was located at number 11. To get there, I had to go down Nowolipki Street ... and look what I found:

Amazing! An Esperanto mural!

It existed on both sides of a shortcut between buildings:

There were Polish translations of the Esperanto text:

I'm afraid Nowolipie Street doesn't hold a candle to it.

This is the section where the Chaim Kelter's printing firm used to stand:

It looked nicer back in the day:

And on I strode to my final destination: Zamenhof's tomb in the Jewish cemetery. As tends to happen to me, I passed a street with a memorable name en route:

Unfortunately, my decision to visit the Museum of the History of Polish Jews backfired to a degree: the Jewish cemetery had closed by the time I got there. That just means I'll have to come back tomorrow morning before I leave Warsaw.

At this point, it was becoming evening and I was a couple of miles away from the Old Town, so it was time to walk back as night was falling:

And after a while, I saw a familiar, if not friendly, face:

One quick glance at the beautiful Castle Square:

And then I headed home.

Tomorrow morning I'll be saying goodbye to Warsaw. I'm glad I came here: it's far, far nicer than I imagined.

Something rare happened today. Not an eclipse; not Halley's comet returning; something rarer than all of those: I overslept.

In the interests of protecting my reputation, I should point out that I didn't really oversleep. Not initially. I still woke up naturally before seven o'clock. The problem was that I saw what the time was, and still felt tired after around four hours' sleep, on top of the lack of sleep before flying out here, so decided to go back to bed. When I awoke again, it was nearing ten o'clock, the time that I should check out!

The host here is very nice (she'd even asked me the previous night when I'd like to check out) so I wasn't concerned about that particularly. What was a matter of concern, though, is that the latest train I could realistically take to Poznan would depart at 11:47; there was a three-hour break before the following train, which wouldn't arrive until 18:17.

That doesn't sound like the worst challenge on paper, does it? Around two hours to get showered, packed, check out, and make the train station. The problem is that there was something I wanted to do first: something I wasn't able to accomplish yesterday because the Jewish cemetery had closed by the time I got there. And the apartment, cemetery and train station were nowhere near one another.

I whizzed through the showering and packing, deposited the keys in the host's coffee shop, and set off to find the appropriate bus-stop. A quick look at the timetable confirmed which bus I needed: the Jewish cemetery was marked there as stop 11.

Unfortunately, it was also marked by a white circle where all the others had a black one, so I thought there might be a problem if I tried to alight there. Fortunately, another stop with just the sort of name which would attract me was immediately before it.

And sure enough, that's the stop I chose to get off at, only a couple of minutes' walk away from the entrance to the cemetery.

But then my heart filled with dread: the metal doors of the cemetery were shut, just as they were yesterday! I remembered having read a note stuck to the door explaining that it would be closed on several days coming up but also distinctly recalled that there was a sequence of several consecutive days starting from tomorrow, but today hadn't been listed. I happen to be the world's worst person regarding dates, however, and so prepared for self-inflicted disappointment again. But not before I decided to try breaking in.

Success! The door gave way easily: it wasn't locked! And soon I was handing over my 20 zloties for a ticket. There wasn't exactly an abundance of space even in so large a cemetery, so off I set.

It didn't take long for my Esperanto-attuned eyes to spot something. Not what I was looking for but something special anyway:

Those are the gravestones of two of Ludoviko's younger brothers, Leono and Felikso. I felt I might be on the right track.

I wasn't. I reached the end of this lengthy aisle and hadn't seen it. I would have to scour the cemetery pulling my suitcase. (If you ever want to feel very self-conscious, I can recommend taking a heavy suitcase as your companion to a cemetery. Oh, the echoes of those wheels being pulled along the stony ground!)

Nothing. I would have to start being scientific: perhaps Leono and Felikso were grouped together because they died only a year apart. That did seem to be a pattern, so I narrowed down the search to plots with older gravestones in whilst the clock ran down.

Still nothing, as I reached the end of an aisle which had been taped off. But then I saw something. Although there was no text on it from the angle from which I was viewing it, you can't be a zamenhofologist and not have an idea of what Ludoviko's tomb looks like. And so I abandoned my suitcase and crossed over the tape into No Man's Land:

And to make things easier for others to picture it, I shot a video of it:

And then I had to rush out: I had a train to catch and needed a tram to get there!

It didn't look good for me: it was supposed to be a 13-minute journey with a 2-minute walk at the end, and then the need to buy a ticket. I think I had about 25 minutes but everything would come down to when the tram arrived.

It did but as quickly as I would've wished. As the stops slowly passed by one by one, I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be late, as I usually am. ("But if I'd left on time I wouldn't have found the tombstone" seems a reasonable excuse to me, even if I can't imagine too many others would agree with me!) By the time I got off the tram, there were minutes to spare, and I dashed away in something of a forlorn hope. Bah, too late: the time had passed, and all the ticket desks were closed. And then I heard something on the tannoy: the 11:47 to Berlin Hauptbahnhof had been delayed by ten minutes. 11:47? That time rang a bell, even if the destination didn't: both Poznań and Berlin lie west of Warsaw, so there might be grounds for hope. I looked at timetable: that's my train, due to have left from platform 3 but delayed! That gave me a few minutes to buy a ticket, and so I hurried to the machine.

And then I promptly hit the machine! It would only allow me to buy tickets from 12:00 onwards: I wanted to buy one for 11:47, ten minutes ago. Hitting the machine did nothing to change its mind, so I decided that the best approach would be to stow away and then try to track down a ticket inspector as soon as we pulled away. I dropped down to the platform.

Over the tannoy there soon rang another announcement in English: the train had been delayed by at least twenty minutes. I can't stand waiting around, so headed off to find a way of getting a ticket. No luck, but a lady spoke to an employee on my behalf, who replied that "nie ma problemu" to the idea that I could just buy one on the train. Great!

And so I returned to the platform. In short order the details for the 11:47 appeared on the signs, and a train appeared on the platform, accompanied by an announcement in Polish. So I boarded it, rather satisfied with my good fortune.

... until I tracked down the ticket inspector about twenty minutes later. A ticket inspector who spoke only Polish, incidentally. This train wasn't going to Poznań: it wasn't even going to Berlin. It was the wrong train. Well, from my perspective. It was the correct train from the point of view of the timetable: it was the train which was scheduled to be departing from that platform at that time. But for some reason they chose to show the details for the delayed 11:47 at the point it arrived, and I don't speak Polish so didn't understand the message on the tannoy.

Between us, non-Polish-speaking me and the monolingual Polish ticket inspector worked out a separate route: I could alight at a stop about twenty minutes away, from where I would have a three-hour stop-over until a train to Poznań departed. Fine! I bought my ticket, and twenty minutes later was in the middle of nowhere, whence I set off to try to find something to do.

I love the idea of living an isolated existence: I'd looked on admiringly at the large houses often with red roofs which were dotted about the route. But it comes at a price in that there are next to no amenities. I found a bar but that wouldn't be open until 16:00. I'd be gone by then. I suppose that was for the best: although I fully intended to find a bar it doesn't bear thinking about what the consequences would be with a three-hour pause at Polish prices: despite my best intentions to stop at three pints, as soon as that one disappeared, it would descend to a binge. It was a good thing for me, then, that there was nothing I could do, as I dragged my case around in the hope that I would chance upon civilisation. Google wasn't much help, refusing to fill in any details for the section of the map which I happened to be in, and struggling to decide which way I was walking at any given time.

After an hour or so, I'd located the town, including a burger joint. I wasn't interested in junk food, so bypassed it. I later returned, having discovered that for some reason or other, everywhere else was shut. I couldn't read the menu: although the names were in English, the descriptions were in Polish. I opted for the "Polish Burger" without knowing what that would entail. As best as I can tell, the Polish element of that was melted Camembert and cranberry sauce, or something along those lines. One rushed meal later, I was off.

As usual, I realised that I had left things late, and ended up dragging my case at pace, occasionally resorting to short bursts of jogging. (I'm not sure whether this was any faster than fast walking but it made me think I was doing a better job.) As I reached the outside of the railway station, my train pulled up. No! There were tracks between me and it, and I couldn't see any way as to how I'd be able to cross them with my case without incurring the wrath of the various guards standing there. The subway it would have to be!

I got there but I was so out of breath at the point I boarded, having pulled the 20 kg case up a ramp whilst jogging. (This part was much easier on the downhill section, though required covering much more ground than just descending via the steps would have.  I didn't see that at the point I chose the ramp, though!) Fortunately, I had the cabin to myself, so no-one had to witness the undignifying sight of the blown-up fat man about to expire.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, as was my arrival into Poznań. Don't get me wrong: Google tried its best to cause me to smash my phone, by constantly changing my position relative to everything else, such that a 20-minute journey took over an hour as I constantly entered and emerged from subways. (By the way, authorities in Poznań: why are most of your escalators broken?) What really got me mad is that by the time I located the halls of residence myself, I realised that I'd originally navigated myself to within 100 metres of them at the point that Google told me that it had changed my mind and I needed to far away from here.

I had a frustrating hour in the halls trying desperately to get an internet connection before eventually giving up and deciding that I wanted a booze-up instead, the lack of internet compounding my impression that I'd signed up to something akin to an IKEA-bedecked prison cell for the rest of the week:

As luck would have it, my stroll into what appears to be a very beautiful night-time Poznań ended up with me in a restaurant which served probably my favourite meal when we're in Central and Eastern Europe: goulash. This one was amazing, as was the bread it came with. But I don't want to end on too positive a note on what had been, the very start and very end aside, a frustrating waste of a day, so I'll point out that the goulash got me a little depressed that no matter how many times I've tried to replicate it, mine never turns out anything like the culinary delights I encounter on my travels.