Oki Doki Hostel Warsaw

The bloody rain. Enough said really. After checking in to the very hip and funky Oki Doki Hostel, I dried off. Of course, the rain then cleared, as obvıously I was inside and thus there was no need for it to rain. The dry condıtıons gave me the opportunity to do some late afternoon exploration of the spread-out city of Warsaw. In the guidebook there are virtually no building descriptions in Warsaw that don't feature the words, "destroyed in 1944, rebuilt in classical style in.....

Greetings from Warsaw! Following a quick layover in Frankfurt, Germany I boarded a 737 (with more legroom than my previous 11 hour flight?!?) bound for Poland. As I woke from a short but needed nap the clear German skies were replaced by a sea of cloud cover. Only once we penetrated the clouds to land did I take my first view behind the former Iron Curtain.

My first few moments there were filled with mishaps...I had money spat at me by an ATM (a rather high quality problem if there wer...

There's just something taboo about being here for someone of my generation. The entire time I was growing up Poland and the majority of Eastern Europe was off limits and relatively inaccessible due to Soviet control. Because of that stigma hanging around in my psychology it feels like I'm getting away with something. Just the fact that I am not is reason enough on this Thanksgiving holiday for me to be thankful!

Over breakfast I met Marco...an engineer from LA and a fellow participant ...

After a night of drinking and kebabs with my new friends several of us decide to check out Praga...the old quarter of the town across the Vistula river. Praga has little to offer tourists except a chance to see the one area that was left standing after World War II and a glimpse in to what Polish life in Warsaw is really like.

Tom, Felix and I take of from Oki Doki with new friend Chris, a Swiss computer engineer here also for the course. Our primary objective was to check out the Prag...

So I keep getting the question "Why Warsaw?" Even the locals were asking...one girl kept asking because she didn't believe me, hoping I would eventually tell her about some sort of secret plot I was involved in. It was simply outside her reality that someone would visit Warsaw as their first stop in Europe. I must admit that Europe itself was further down the list than say Africa, India or Colombia, let alone Warsaw. To answer everyone's question: I wanted to learn something about myself.
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I would happily have stayed in Krakow another few days but I do have to keep on the move or I'll never get home. It was a four day, 360km, cycle to Warsaw. I travelled mainly on the smaller roads. The roads in Poland are in a very poor state, cracked, rutted and pot holed. I think the EU will be spending a lot of money on Polish roads, they are possibly worse than those in Ireland 15 to 20 years ago. The weather was mainly sunny in the morning and dull in the afternoon, but only a couple of h...

What the heck! One more entry. I had a good day today. After getting a train ticket (by showing the ticket agent a piece of paper with destination, time of departure, and class written on it)I wondered to downtown. As luck would have it, there was some kind of 20's/30's celebrations going on in the Old town. So I spent most of my day there watching the theatre actors do their thing. It was a great joy to watch them and I took many great photographs. Earlier, being a keen photographer, I went ...

Our first night on the train was fine. The train pulled into platform 5 at Cologne, and we found our little cabin that was to be our home for the next 12 hours. We both found it suprisingly easy to sleep on the train, but you tend to wake up quite frequently and get that strange feeling when you wake up and can't quite figure out where you are. We woke up at about 7:30am, and Sarah pointed out that we were in Frankfurt. Frankfurt? Now my geography isn't fantastic, but with my vague knowledge ...

The last city of our 7 week trip. Our hostel was hard to find and took a while to get to because Warsaw is huge. It is a city I am not very fond of. If I didn't have family here I would probably not choose to visit. It does not have charm to it and is too industrialized. But how can it have charm after it was completely destroyed during the war. So when we got to Warsaw we were absolutely starving and ended up at a place called Sphinx, which my friends and I made fun of last year and called i...

Today hung out with my cousin Wojtek and his wife Agata. Jeff soon learned Wojtek was just like I described him: a genius that knows anything possible, super talkative, hyper, all over the place, and again super talkative. We went to Lazienki...the old royal gardens. We roamed around, the guys chased peacocks around, and then we fed squirrels. I have had a fear of squirrels since I was 4 so this was like a turning point in my life. haha. But Lazienki are really beautiful. Peacocks and wild bi...