Day 13 Warsaw

Palace of Culture and Science

A waitress who had attended college in Montreal told me, "I want to move back to Montreal where people know how to live. People don't know how to live here. It's so so boring." With 1.6 million people the sprawling city is everywhere but really nowhere. The Old Town, completely reconstructed after it was distroyed by the Nazis in 1944 in the aftermath of the Warsaw uprising, is a focal point for tourist, but I doubt the city's heart and soul. First impressions are never reliable. It would take me a long time to get to know what really makes this city tick. Indeed, it's Catholic and conservative - in Old Town, it seems, there's a church every few feet. But like the gloomy mist clinging to the church bell towers, you feel a heaviness in the air in which the old guard and social realism continue to dull the senses. Not nearly as stolid as in the 70s when I visited East Berlin and Prague, but there nonetheless. You see it in the manner and method with which people go about their daily tasks - expressionless and methodical - outside of Old Town, few, if any, speak English or German - an insularity insured by the vastness of the city. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most have not been to a foreign country.