Warsaw, Poland
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Warsaw is a fairly large place, whilst driving through it to the airport in a taxi on my third day there, I realised my wanderings of the previous day hadn’t taken me round even a quarter of the city. The taxi’s I should warn you, happily clock up a fee even when their not moving, so those on a tight budget may wish to think about getting out if stuck in one of the rush hour jams.
You’d have to be on a pretty tight budget though to need to worry as most things are fairly cheap over there. The going rate for a Big Mac meal in October ’99 is around 80p, so nobody need starve. For the real bargain hunters, there’s a market just outside the ‘Palac Kultury I Nauki’, this is a building well worth a visit in it’s own right. It was built as a monument to communist ideology, most of the locals don’t much like the reminder, but there’s not much you can do to hide a thirty storey building, so there it stays. Much to my surprise there is a lot of old architecture to go and have a look at, though much of Warsaw was flattened at the end of the war, they have done a good job of rebuilding the major public buildings in the old style.
I would recommend finding a map before venturing out, unless you speak some Polish. Finding someone who can speak English is next to impossible, and Polish isn’t a language you can even guess at.
You’d have to be on a pretty tight budget though to need to worry as most things are fairly cheap over there. The going rate for a Big Mac meal in October ’99 is around 80p, so nobody need starve. For the real bargain hunters, there’s a market just outside the ‘Palac Kultury I Nauki’, this is a building well worth a visit in it’s own right. It was built as a monument to communist ideology, most of the locals don’t much like the reminder, but there’s not much you can do to hide a thirty storey building, so there it stays. Much to my surprise there is a lot of old architecture to go and have a look at, though much of Warsaw was flattened at the end of the war, they have done a good job of rebuilding the major public buildings in the old style.
I would recommend finding a map before venturing out, unless you speak some Polish. Finding someone who can speak English is next to impossible, and Polish isn’t a language you can even guess at.
