Warsaw (Poland), August 12th to 15th.

[Markus Becker]

Wednesday, 

Met Jose around 8:30 at breakfast. Took a taxi to the train station and initially had the entire coach to myself. 

Jose's flights didn't get cancelled this time and after a round trip to Helsinki and back over Poland and Italy he made it home without problems.

My train was going quite slow for the first hour before picking up speed. Delays were in the single digits thanks to generous planned stays in the stations. Until we reached the border with +15. Then came some announcements with 30 minutes. 

Thurs out our locomotive was dual system and we had to wait for the one from the train from Berlin to continue. Which we did with a plus 50 delay. 

The next ICE from Berlin then started half an hour late because the train with the crew coming from the opposite direction was more than an hour late. 

By now ETA had gone from 19:48 to 21:21. It went to 21:48 because there had been a line closure. The planned regional train was an hour late but they run ever 30 minutes. So that wasn't too bad. 

At home I repacked the bags for the next days work. Had one Polish chicken baguette and some beers before calling it a night.

 

All in all the trip was a most interesting experience in many ways I wouldn't have wanted to miss. Nice stuff, great people. 

 

 

Edited August 17, 2023 by Markus Becker

[Markus Becker]

Thread resurrection! 

After a seven week holiday and one at work what passes for planning gave me another week off. 

So off I go to Warsaw to meet people and see (armored) stuff. 

[urbanoid]

I have arrived, fuck this fucking two-lane Łódź-Warsaw 'highway' where most of the time you're not even able to go the speed limit (140). Also fuck this fucking road construction works in the city centre forcing me to... ignore them and simply drive past the 'no entry' signs.

Otherwise everything's great!

[sunday]

Have fun, guys!

[Markus Becker]

I like to give PKP Inter City high-ish marks.

Yes,my reserved seat was in the coach with the broken AC. Just like last year BUT ....

I got a seat in another coach

and the train was almost constantly going 160 flat. 

450km in 4,5 hours 👍🏻

Plus no conductor caught me illegally drinking a beverage that's 95% alcohol free. 

[Markus Becker]

Damian and Hubert are busy. Matt's returning to Lodz. Time to eat, drink and recap what's happened of the trip. 

 

August 14th,

Met Matt at the hotel. We had one or two beers right away, a few more at an old factory complex that's now a restaurant/bar complex within walking distance. The we met with Hubert in Gangster Praga at last year's pub that is serving dinner in glass jars. After eating and drinking we went to another one or two places to have beer(s). And back to the hotel where we had one more. 

By this time it was 02:00 am.

Next up:  Us six and a half hour later and on the way to not see the parade and listen to Polish politicians.

 

[Markus Becker]

August 15th, ~09:00 ish at the breakfast buffet.

 

Both of us looked pretty good(considering the circumstances.) After many coffees we headed to the citadel (not to see the parade because that was such a mess last year)

In we went, running straight into modern tanks: K2 Abrams, M1 Leopard, Bradley 2 ... whatever. 

Met Damian and another guy who tried to talk modern AFV sense into someone who can barely tell a T-55 from a T-62. 

The old stuff was great. That French 240mm howitzer. Kubus(the real thing) was there too. 

On the wheeled AFV like HIMARS and KMARS and into the new museum of Polish history. A WIP but promising. Lot's of the pre industrial era stuff. 

Then a round behind the Polish Military Museum. No reenactors but lots of recruiters. Need to find the man and woman power for the 6th and 7th division I guess.

So we were done with the static display around 14:00 hearing loudspeaker noises from the riverside. 

Went past the historic cavalry guys when they got ready to deploy and by blind dumb luck found a spot with a pretty good view of the parade route. Old St. Pete was smiling at us: With just slightly plus 30°C and the occasional clouds.

The Polish politicians otoh are way too fond of hearing themselves talk. President - Prime Minister - Defence Minister - President again. 

60 minutes of talk to endure to see 50 minutes of parade. Plenty of Poles, Yanks, Romanians, some who tried to march like Brits. F-35 in the fly by. 

Got out ahead of the wave, to the hotel, under the shower, to the hotel bar and in a taxi to Praga for Hubert and some Serbian Bosnian food. 

 

[sunday]

Very nice!

[urbanoid]

Small corrections:

The Balkan restaurant (Banjaluka) wasn't in Praga, it was on 'our' side of the river. 

I'm drinking the Modlin beer now - Garnizonowe (from the word 'garrison'), produced in Poznań but sold exclusively in the Modlin Fortress. A very nice one, should have bought more!

[sunday]

1 minute ago, urbanoid said:

Small corrections:

The Balkan restaurant (Banjaluka) wasn't in Praga, it was on 'our' side of the river. 

I'm drinking the Modlin beer now - Garnizonowe (from the word 'garrison'), produced in Poznań but sold exclusively in the Modlin Fortress. A very nice one, should have bought more!

Where did you stay?

[urbanoid]

Holiday Inn on Twarda, about a kilometer from last year's Hilton. 

[sunday]

12 minutes ago, urbanoid said:

Holiday Inn on Twarda, about a kilometer from last year's Hilton. 

One of the hotels I considered past year.

[Markus Becker]

Within easy walking distance of the central station, thus my pick. Interesting underground parking situation according to Matt. 

[urbanoid]

Yep, so interesting that after Saturday (Modlin and Piłsudski's museum in Sulejówek where we went by car) I decided not to use that parking anymore for the last night and simply parked on the street nearby.

[sunday]

So interesting as in the famed Chinese curse?

That one about "May you live in interesting times", I mean.

[urbanoid]

It's apparently not a Chinese curse but... an allegedly Chinese curse made up by some Brit.

No normal parking garage where you drive down and find your spot, just a rather narrow lift that takes you to a -1 or -2 level. Rather hard to maneuver down there too, you also need a hotel employee every time you want to enter and leave.

[sunday]

2 minutes ago, urbanoid said:

It's apparently not a Chinese curse but... an allegedly Chinese curse made up by some Brit.

No normal parking garage where you drive down and find your spot, just a rather narrow lift that takes you to a -1 or -2 level. Rather hard to maneuver down there too, you also need a hotel employee every time you want to enter and leave.

Cumbersome...

That reminds me of the need to read hotel reviews wrt parking when there are cars involved. That hotel in Schiphol was good, but that was pure luck.

[Markus Becker]

August 16th,

Breakfast. Not sure if it was this or the previous day when we met some old dude who implied he was going to Ukraine, for a year, on government business, knew about the 2nd Kursk Offensive in advance and was just waiting for the driver to arrive the next day.

Anyway, the plan was to go to the Uprising Museum(Poland could have quite a few of those, well they actually do) first thing in the hope of arriving ahead of the crowd. 

We didn't. The line was long and not really moving, so we did. First to the museum in what's left of the Gestapo prison Pawiak, then the Gestapo HQ museum, a beer an back to the Uprising. This time the idea was that everyone else was having lunch.

A popular idea by the lenght of the line. Well, we had experience in standing around and most of the time we could do it in the shade. I think I have never taken so many showers per day before this trip. 

After slightly less waiting than the day before we got in. Definitely worth the time. Lots of well presented information and artifacts. We left after about two hours at ~15:30. Two and a half hours before closing and not a single soul was waiting to get in. 

Back to the hotel, under the shower, in the taxi to meet with Hubert again, who had been our guide throughout the day. 

This time we met in some party street that was closed to raid traffic. Got four invitations to strip clubs in less than five minutes. Of course declined all of them. The surrounding scenery was more than attractive enough already. Got to two different places, one in the main road with excellent view of the passers by. 

Hubert met a coworker where we had lunch and Matt hopped into a pharmacy to buy me some Polish preemptive hangover pill that certainly didn't hurt. Also not hurting: spreading the beers over a longer period of time and some walking in between. 

[Markus Becker]

August 16th, Fortress Modlin and the Pilsudski museum.

 

A quick drive to Modlin. We went into an ancillary museum first that had was having stuff from the Napoleonic times to the Cold War. Then into the fortress that is one semi underground exhibit complex - they could do more in English – and then into the actual barracks complex. Well, a small part because that thing is huge and mostly empty and decaying. We went up one tower to an observation platform with an excellent view of the surroundings. The confluence of the rivers, Warsaw in the background, the ruins of the grainery. Inside was a mind boggling collection of this Chinese military lego: models and dioramas.

After one refreshment we headed to the museum. Very well done exhibition and very comprehensive. We just so managed to see almost all of it before they closed. Nearby the army probably did some PR/recruting with an MRAP and an M1(the tank).

BTW, did you know that four Polish Prime Ministers used to be honest train robbers before they went on to steal taxpayer money on a much grander scale?

Dinner was in Praga I think. Twice. First we had something and than we did a three way partition of a Pizza before Matt and I ended up in that bar with the fake mugshots we already visited last year.

 

[urbanoid]

Ah, we didn't tell you? COBI is a Polish company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobi_(building_blocks)

[Markus Becker]

On 8/21/2024 at 5:03 PM, urbanoid said:

Ah, we didn't tell you? COBI is a Polish company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobi_(building_blocks)

Do they have a TKS? 

[urbanoid]

1 minute ago, Markus Becker said:

Do they have a TKS? 

They did, but after checking several sites all TKSes are 'unavailable', including on their own.

[Markus Becker]

August 17th. Last day. 
 

Hubert had stuff to do at home so Matt and I were left unsupervised. 

We went to the Museum of Polish Military Technology. It had a rather Soviet touch. Located in an old Russian fort there were plenty of Soviet artillery and AT guns in front and something unusual. The mountings/housings of bunker guns. It's interesting to see what a huge metal structure is needed to mount a rather small caliber gun like a 45mm.

On the side were a lot of Soviet AFV from T-34/85 to the late CW T-55 with some Americans mixed in. 

The inter war stuff was inside. The mandatory TKS but also a 7TP and artillery tractors. 

The area behind the fort is a MiG ally (Suchois too). 

 

After a coffee for us and gas for the car we tried for a museum of Stalinists victims but it's guided tours only and we arrived an hour before the next began. 

Matt didn't want to be on THAT f...ing highway when the afternoon rush started, so he dropped me off at the hotel and went home. 

 

I hit the shower and then went to the railway museum. It is just a few hundred meters south west of the hotel. Got in for free. The register had a software problem. 

Good exhibit indoors but again more English text would have been nice. And easy to do with Google translate. 

The locomotives and cars outside all had info plates in both languages. Speaking of, the steam locomotives often used to have been German or German influenced designs. Both the inter and post war ones. 

One of the high points is part of an armored train. A German diesel locomotive with 80mm armor. They were definitely thinking about more than splinters and bullets. Captured by the Soviets and handed over to the Polish. The two gun cars got captured first by the Germans from the Poles. 

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmachtslokomotive_WR_550_D_14

 

After that I went back to the hotel and on the way into the Wola museum. For free because it was free on that day. They too had software problems, so no magnet. Small place with one exhibit of the history of Wola and two of the history of Wola's past 1989 party and club scene. 

 

After another shower in the hotel I had lunch with some beers in the old factory turned restaurant complex. The one that includes the craft beer bar Matt and I tried on day one, so a few more Piwos there. Including the 8% we skipped but also something the turned out lemon beer. Not as bad as the strawberry beer from day one though. After that I stuck to the known stuff. #3! 

The Polish wonder alcohol metabolism drug got some work to do.