Entry no. 8: The Phoenix City

After a delayed departure, with just a few hours of sleep and with a hungry tummy, we landed in rainy, foggy Warsaw.

We were anxious to get to the hotel, drop the luggage and eat something.
First order of the day: buy bus tickets.
The self-ticketing machine found in front of the airport almost sabotaged us.
The menu was in polish and... I don't know any. I kinda guessed what it said, thanks to word similarity. Google Translate lend a helping hand also. I took a picture of the screen, translate it, chose the right option; then took another photo, translated again, clicked again.
Needless to say, a queue formed by the time I took the tickets and my fingers were like claws, stiff from the cold.
We checked in the hotel, grabed something to eat and went in the Old Town, Stare Miasto in polish.
On our way, we've found this graffiti. I think it says children of Warsaw

The center is just charming, with colourful houses. The buildings are well taken care of, you couldn't tell their age. It's worth mentioning that most of Warsaw was destroied during World War II and rebuild, hence the name Phoenix City.
The streets and sidewalks are wide, with plenty of space.

It snowed the first night. We hoped it wouldn't melt because we didn't have snow back at home either. The cold didn't bother us, exploring the city kept us warm.

The photo above illustrates very well the atmosphere in the polish capital: empty.
There were barely any people on the streets, no matter the hour. To be honest, the city is huge, double the size of Bucharest, but smaller population density.

Another thing that I liked are the passage ways. Wherever you want to go, there's a tunnel so you don't have to cross a crowded road or highway.
That goes well with good public transport.

We got along with locals well, speaking english and broken russian. One moment I remember fondly was in a small grocery store. After paying, I asked the cashier to change my coins into banknotes. My wallet wasn't closing from all the groszy (subdivision of the zloty). She was so nice and patient to count all that change I had.