I like the Nightlife...

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...I like to Boogie.

Nowhere was this more painfully evident than in Warsaw. I know there's more to this confusing (and yet straightforward), welcoming (and yet impossible), modern (and yet hidden beneath layers of unlearnable history), unfathomable (and yet strangely magnetic) town than you'll see here. But a picture tells a thousand words, and besides... most of what I loved about Warsaw I felt. I'll never be able to describe it to you properly.

I thrived in Warsaw... I felt it's pull almost immediately. It sang and danced around me, it offered me gllimpses of pre-war Europe and it maddened me with envy for it's costly boutiques.

I saw the ravages of war and I cried openly in public at the sad stories of it's people. I was also ashamed of my own deeply hidden prejudices and homegrown comfort, and the easy life I've been privileged to lead.

I met real Polish people with real stories and amazing character. And I met foreigners from far and wide living in Warsaw - all with views as varied as the day to day sentiments spewed forth by the potato-headed Polish Prime Minister.

I lived the story of Maria Skłodowska (Marie Curie) and her genuinely inspiring pathway to two Nobel prizes, and I feasted at the tables of ordinary Polish merchants selling exceptional chai tea and pastries.

I braved the Stadion on a Sunday morning on my own and lived to tell the tale, and I foiled a would-be thief on the over night train from Trencin.

But despite it's many offerings, Warsaw was begging to be explored at night, to be roamed as aimlessly and as drunkenly as its crooked, broken pathways would allow. I obeyed. I drank to excess in cheesy nightclubs and I took it slow in classy tea rooms. I drank at home, and in the park.

And I did it all with friends. THAT part I can describe. Curiously, crazily, amazingly fine people... who took me in and made me one of their own.

Ania & Matt, Marta & Raf, Marta & Tomek, Kinga & Peirszu, Agata & Marek and Arek - you know you made a special tiny hole in my heart that won't be filled again until I return.

And return I will...

(Photos coming soon)

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