Warsaw
Travelling through the grey, faceless housing estates surrounding Warsaw or crossing the windswept avenues that punctuate the centre, you could be forgiven for wishing yourself elsewhere. But a knowledge of Warsaw's rich and often tragic history can transform the city, revealing voices from the past in even the plainest quarters: a pockmarked wall becomes a precious prewar relic, a housing estate the one-time centre of Europe's largest ghetto, the whole city a living book of modern history. Amongst the concrete, there are reconstructed traces of Poland's royal past, including a castle, a scattering of palaces and parks, and the restored streets of the historic Stare Miasto.
Wending its way north towards Gdañsk and the Baltic Sea, the Wis³a river divides Warsaw neatly in half: the main sights are located on the western bank, while the eastern consists predominantly of residential and industrial districts.
West of the Stare Miasto, in the Muranów and Mirów districts, is the former ghetto area, where the No¿yk Synagogue and the cemetery on ul. Okopowa (Cmentarz ¯ydowski) bear poignant testimony to the lost Jewish population. South from the Stare Miasto lies Œródmieœcie, the city's commercial centre, which was rebuilt in a haphazard manner following World War II, leaving plenty of empty spaces that have proved fertile ground for new office blocks. In spite of recent additions, however, the skyline is still dominated by the Pa³ac Kultury i Nauki (Palace of Culture and Science), Stalin's enduring legacy to the citizens of Warsaw. Linking the Stare Miasto and Œródmieœcie, Krakowskie Przedmieœcie is dotted with palaces and Baroque spires, and forms the first leg of the Trakt Królewski (Royal Way), a procession of open boulevards stretching all the way from pl. Zamkowy to the stately king's residence at Wilanów on the southern outskirts of the city. Along the way is Park £azienkowski, the most delightful of Warsaw's many green spaces and the setting for the charming Pa³ac £azienkowski (£azienki Palace), surrounded by waterways and lakes.
Warsaw is much livelier and more cosmopolitan than it's often given credit for, and the postwar dearth of nightlife and entertainment is now a complaint of the past. A constantly growing range of inviting bars, restaurants and clubs has appeared to cater for the new consumer classes and the thousands of resident expatriates, and if prices are high by Polish standards they still compare favourably to those in the West. If you're arriving without personal connections or contacts, the city can seem forbidding, with much of the place still shutting down within a few hours of darkness, but Varsovians are generous and highly hospitable people: no social call, even to an office, is complete without a glass of herbata and a plate of cakes. Postwar austerity strengthened the tradition of home-based socializing, and if you strike up a friendship here (and friendships in Warsaw are quickly formed) you'll find much to enrich your experience of the city.
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