Blue Dress Hot Mess

25-26th May 2025

25/05/25:

Before Warsaw:

I am going in with no expectations. I have not even found the time in my single unemployed life to look up the place’s history. How on earth do people with families and careers do it? I have decided I will learn on the job and observe the people and the place through the eyes of a toddler.

Flight number LO280:

I see pink clouds and packaged cashews. I hear flustered air hostesses and Eastern European voices offering ‘Ser-vice? Wine-Beer?’ without really pausing to hear my reply. (It is No, anyway. It is 8:23pm, and we are somewhere on a Lot aeroplane flight between Heathrow Terminal 2 and the Warsaw Grand Mercure Hotel. I have been drinking Aperol already today, and I do not think mid-flight ‘airplane’ alcohol would compare to Engagement-party Aperol in the sun-kissed benevolence of an English walled garden). I am watching the sun set from behind the wing, and wondering whether the close of day is always so beautiful from Heaven. I suppose it is; and, if I were God, I too would choose this for my pre-slumber view. It is fairy-lit. I could watch it for hours. It is almost — almost — as mesmerising as MAFs. They are collecting the rubbish, which I think is a good sign. We must be nearly there. My lips are chapped, my Vaseline is in the overhead lockers, and I must fold my too-tiny table away for landing, so the next time I write we will be in Poland. And perhaps I will have found some Vaseline.

The first thing I saw in Poland was McDonald’s. Those Golden Arches really are an international beacon. Their hoops of French fried fat transcend every language, every alphabet. (Although, helpfully, Poland abides by the same alphabet as I am naturally used to, so at least I can read the signs, even if I sound like a toddler with its thumb stuck in its mouth when doing so). It smells so far of cigarettes and Europe, in a way I cannot describe. It is more of a feeling, a low-lying stench. The belly of a fat man rolling over his trousers, like an overstuffed muffin top. Quite gentle, quite merry, quite harmless. (The man in my head is Italian, I am not quite sure why. He has grey hair and a silly, beer-at-lunchtime-fuelled smile, and he’s a farmer in the Northern hills of Italy and he chews corn and wears a straw hat. Perhaps he’s a living scarecrow. Perhaps he no longer exists). Perhaps – most likely – I need to go to bed.

I wrote that in the taxi at 11pm. I read it now the next day, and I wonder whether the Aperol and flying had gone to my head.

26/05/25:

I have brought a book to breakfast, more as a crutch for myself than because I actually intend to read it (although it is very interesting — about Germany — about the War). I think this is my first hotel breakfast alone, although I can’t quite remember. Poland waits outside the window, but it waits inside, too. It is lurking in the pickled herring and cottage cheese (I sit eating porridge and drinking milky coffee, the little blue-jumpered English girl taking up a table for four people and scribbling obnoxiously in her little green notebook).

People sell flowers everywhere, and the whole place is filled with birdsong. I am sure I’m about to be run over, because I can’t tell what’s pavement and what’s road. Warsaw is flat and leafy and green, and has endless wide wide boulevards with parks either side dedicated to the prisoners of Stalinism (or something similar). The people are friendly, if expressionless. The sun is hot; late May.

Another capital city, another part of my heart to fill with noise and knowledge and food. I smile at everything (a builder gives me a strange look as we pause at a cross roads together, and I whip out my phone to take a picture of a tram – quick, quick, before it runs us over! I am typing as I walk, and I have strayed dangerously and a little drunkenly into the cycle lane). 

Travelling in India, my learning felt sensory, cultural. It did not speak to my head but to my heart. There, I was learning about parts of myself; here, my education feels perfectly tangible, my brain a literal blank space waiting for someone to scratch in chalk the History of Poland in large capital letters, so that you can see them from the very back of the class. My learning is entirely objective and historical, and I enjoy it. Tourism takes makes forms.

I am in the site of a ghetto. I almost walked past the audio-guide stand, which may have caused some problems. The fractured architecture of the museum is a symbolisation of the rupture of Jewish history; the glass wall a symbol of life. POLIN: Rest Here, in Hebrew. I will not rest. I will try, try, to picture it, to feel in any small way I can: their loss.

I stepped over the ‘wall’ that used to divide the Jewish Ghetto from the Main Town. It is a brass line, ten inches thick, which stretches right to left across the road and pavement. One step. Too many lives. 

3:45pm: I have seen six churches, which means I have crossed and re-crossed myself 12 times today, so I must be very blessed. I have walked over 8.5 miles. I have eaten an enormous chocolate and pistachio doughnut, and drunk a sweet iced tea filled with raspberries and pineapple. The sky has turned grey, and I have turned in, sitting cross-legged on my bed in a state of over-touristed exhaustion. If there were a degree for being a Good Tourist, I hope I’d get a First. At least an A+ for effort – plus a couple of extra blessings for the churches. Poland still waits outside my window. But it waits inside too, closer than before. It is within me, occupying a little space in my heart reserved for Travel Unknown. It has only just moved in; the place still needs decorating, and the suitcase is lying semi-unpacked on the floor, clothes strewn everywhere like a teenager’s bedroom (because who didn’t have a floor-drobe?). She will unpack slowly, carefully, over the next two days. But she will always leave space for a returning visitor; like God, Poland’ house has many rooms.