Poland, Chapter 1: My Arrival Into Warsaw


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Europe » Poland » Masovia » Warsaw
September 23rd 2011
Published: September 24th 2011
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Note: All the events mentioned in this entry occurred back in late September to early October 2006. For more updated entries and trips, please refer to this website at a later date.


Two weeks after my trip to Paris, I was finishing up my preparations for my upcoming 14-day trip to Poland. I had actually been preparing this trip for months, actually years. The primary reason why I chose to travel to Poland was to learn more about my Polish ancestry. I am a quarter Polish thanks to my maternal grandfather, who immigrated to the US from Poland in 1946 through a sponsor. Back in 1939, he and his family were captured by the Nazis from their small farm in one of Warsaw's suburbs, separated from one another and placed in concentration camps. He was first placed in a "labor camp" at the tender age of twelve. He somehow managed to escape, using false passports and his encyclopedic knowledge of eight languages, most of them Eastern European. However, despite this he was captured and placed in four other concentration camps, including a gulag in the USSR. He finally escaped and was found by an American battalion, which offered him a job in underground efforts to stop the Nazis. Once he made it to the US, he altered his last name and eventually married my grandmother in the early 1950s when he moved to FL.

That's all I know about his story. Unfortunately he died several years before I was born, and my mother and grandmother had very little contact with him. He wasn't around much and was difficult to get along with. However, despite the conflicting sentiments my mother and maternal grandmother shared for him, I couldn't help but to be fascinated about him. I wanted to know more about his story and about him in general. But unfortunately I didn't know where to start, because he altered his surname and we didn't have exact place names, streets, nor all the countries he was in. I also didn't have the money or the resources to start doing genealogical research I felt at the time. Even if I did, I didn't know where to start. So, I figured I would just start with the facts I knew about my grandfather's story as a guide for my trip and try to prove its accuracy as much as possible and get a sense as to who he was and what he became.


My itinerary was as follows: take a train from Dijon to Paris, and then pick up a Eurolines bus from Paris to head to Warsaw (close to 48 hrs worth of travel). Once in Warsaw, spend three days. After three days, spend rest of time in Krakow, tour the city. After seeing the city, take a trip to Auschwitz, and then take a bus from Krakow back to Paris, and then a train back to Dijon. To prepare for the trip, I had studied websites regarding destinations in Poland for a year and a half. I had even started to study the language for the same amount of time on my own. While in Dijon I purchased a guidebook and a Polish/French dictionary.

The day for my trip finally came. I walked to the train station as always and boarded a TGV for Paris. Unfortunately because of travel time within the metro once I arrived in Paris I ended up missing my bus (It takes an hour and a half to travel from Gare to Lyon to Gallieni, which is its own stop. You have to connect three times, and the metro lines are very long, like the ones in NYC). So I had no choice but to get another ticket (which wasn't a problem because I had purchased a monthly pass for 35 euro which allowed unlimited travel all over Europe). My bus would travel later in the evening, I think around 9 PM was my scheduled departure.

I had no where else to go, so I just camped out at the bus station there in Gallieni until it arrived. It did make an effort to read my guidebook a bit and study some Polish and I talked to some of the travelers there at the station. Finally my bus arrived and I went on board and chose a seat. As soon as the drivers got into their seats I realized there was one slight annoyance: the drivers only spoke Polish. All the announcements they made were in Polish, the knowledge I had was not enough to understand what they were saying! Even the movies that were shown while on the bus were only in Polish! I will admit I felt a little intimidated and also a little regret for choosing the bus as my travel medium because I was afraid of a graver repeat of my miscalculations mistaking the Nuit Saint Georges train station w/ Dijon's (for more details please refer to blog entry: "Memories of France: Recollections of my Study Abroad Year in France Part 1-The Arrival).

However, even though I felt dubious about my current endeavors towards traveling to Poland, I decided to continue with the journey. After all this is only the bus, I thought, and of course I'm not going to understand Polish fluently after 1 year and a half of self-study without conversation and grammar practice! Besides, how can I judge Poland from a bus, I hadn't even set foot within country borders yet! So I took a deep breath, and enjoyed the visuals of the movie, and tried to guess what words meant in Polish by trying to match the words with actions, which did help.

Every hour, one of the bus drivers would come to each aisle and ask, "coffee, tea?" At least I understood that, and was always grateful to have a spot of tea or coffee. It was after all late September and was starting to get colder, but having one of the bus drivers come around, prepare each of us a cup of tea or coffee the way we wanted just made me feel welcome and helped me to feel better about my choice to take the bus to Warsaw.

And sure enough, my trip did get better. For example, as we neared the Belgian border, we passed through quaint little farms and villages with sheep and cattle in the Lorraine region of France. I couldn't get over how green the grass was, and the swaying landscape dotted with hills. Even though I grew up in a small country town in FL, I had never seen landscapes like this before. I had heard about the beauty of the Lorraine region but it was surreal and a treat to see it in person.

The minute we arrive in Belgium, the bus drivers decide to take a pit stop at a huge gas station, which included a restaurant and a mini mart. We only had 30 minutes, so I decided to go to the mini mart and grab a snack (I had already eaten a sandwich back at a local galleria mall for dinner). Since I was in Belgium, I decided to grab a chocolate bar-I read the labels to make sure that it was made there. I don't remember the name of the brand unfortunately but that didn't matter. I also bought a huge bottle of water for the trip because I didn't know when our next pit stop would be. I wasn't ready to go back on the bus, so I decided to stand outside of it, ripped open my chocolate bar and broke off a piece to eat. That creamy, silky, sweet texture of the chocolate, tasted so good after my long day of traveling.


It was time to get back on the bus, and back to our movie, which was Taxi 2 dubbed horribly in Polish. The movie before was a Polish crime drama which was quite good, but at least I could understand some of Taxi 2 because it was originally done in French, and the dubbing was done so badly that I could still hear some of the French. The next awesome event that brightened up my trip on the bus was the fact we went right through Brussels in order for the bus to make its next stop at Gare du Nord for more passengers.

It was at this stop that a very tall, thin man with a brown backpack with short sandy brown hair and a mustache in his late 50s early 60s came to sit down next to me. There was a heavy scent of beer, so heavy he smelled like a busy bar. As soon as the bus leaves the station, he asks me, from what I could understand from the little bit of Polish I understood, was where were you traveling to. He then asks me why did I not answer and all I could say was "Nie mowi po polski (I don't speak Polish). Mowe Angluczki? (Do you speak English?) He replies with a firm nie (no in Polish) and tells me the only other languages he speaks are French and Russian. I light up "Oh I speak French!" He then asks me the question again, this time in French. "So why are you going to Poland?" "I'm going as a tourist. My grandfather immigrated from there, and I just want to get an idea of what his country was like." He goes silent. He then asks me, "There's nothing much in Poland. Be my guest, but your grandfather did you a favor. Where are you from?" "The United States." "Oh, a lot of Polish Americans there." He then, like every foreigner I will meet on this trip, will ask me about the US. I then ask him about what brought him to Brussels. "I was there on business; I'm an engineer by trade. I travel for work, particularly between Brussels and Poland (I forget where in Poland he was from)." I then ask him why and he replies, "There's more opportunities in Brussels." "Do you have a family." "Yes I have a daughter, your age attending university and then I have my wife." It was at this moment that he took out a bottle of beer from his backpack. Our conversation basically lasted the entire trip, because I start to ask him more questions about Poland, I also ask him about Brussels. I get advice from him about Warsaw, etc. He was even gracious enough to help translate for me what the drivers were announcing. However, what disturbed was that every 10-20 minutes he pulled out another bottle of beer to drink from his backpack-so many times I lost count (btw we weren't supposed to have alcohol on the bus, it said so in several different languages-I don't know how he got away with this.) Whenever we made a pit stop (we made 4 more before we arrived in Warsaw). He would go in and buy more. I was disturbed by this I will admit and I was a little concerned for my safety. However, thank goodness nothing happened, and actually he was a nice gentleman and it felt comforting to have someone on the bus, who actually spoke a language I did too.

In Antwerp, our next stop after Brussels, a middle aged Polish lady came to sit in one of the seats across from us. He began to talk to her when our conversation started to get a bit dry. During our 5 am GMT pit stop at a gas station in Germany near the Belgique/German border, I got a chance to talk with her. I spoke a little German, so I could communicate a little with her, but I ended up conversing with her through the help of the Polish gentleman translating from French to Polish. I believe she was also traveling home after work I don't remember, but I told her my story, why I was going to Poland, why I was in France, etc. most of the same things I had told the gentleman. Her response was a lot more warm and she seemed a lot more interested in my effort to come and see Poland. She was also going back home to family-I think she had more than one child, I think she had a son and a daughter and I believe she was widowed. After that, both he and her would stay with me when we made pit stops, as if watching over me which also felt nice.

Our next stop around 5:40 am GMT was Berlin. I was greeted by tall, shinny, glowing skyscrapers, the most modern I had seen ever really. There was no one there for the bus to pick up, so we were encouraged to get off and and get some fresh air. Around 6 am GMT we got back onto the bus. I felt listless and made an effort to sleep, however I felt uncomfortable because I was sleeping in a passenger seat. Therefore, around 8 am GMT I decided to make an effort to eat the little strawberry yogurt balls I bought in the gas station when we first arrived in Germany. It was at this time that I noticed how beautiful the open green meadow that we were driving past was, and how golden and glistening the rays of the sun were as they peered through the windows of the bus. I remember it was so bright that I felt a bit blinded, but I decided that I should stay up and enjoy the view.

We make it to the Polish/German border around 9 AM GMT. Two border patrol men come on the bus, one with a gun and one without. All Polish citizens immediately took out their ids to demonstrate their viability to enter. Everyone else had to get out their passports. The patrolman with the gun was the one who was collecting passports-he took a look at mine, I remember he had a perplexed look on his face when he saw it, which got me a little concerned. They were gone for a long time-we were parked there for almost an hour-2 hours I would estimate. My new found friends and I decided to get off, talk a bit and relax, which I appreciated because I was a little scared, especially since I did see two people who were made to get off the bus. However, I did get my passport back and I was one of the lucky many allowed to stay on.

I felt so relieved once we got past the border and were officially in Poland! I figured that I would be in Warsaw like in 2-3 hours but boy was I wrong. The bus ended up traveling to like 4-6 more cities: Poznan, Lodz, a small town I can't remember the name of, and two other places I don't remember. But I got to see a lot of the country thanks to this bus trip.

I remember the Polish countryside being very flat, with very little trees. all the cities we approached had very small houses, which all had a little garden where people actually had planted flowers and vegetables. When we drove through downtown Poznan and Lodz, I saw buildings that still had bullet holes and smoke stains, which I assumed were left over from WWII which I remember that impacting me emotionally. I thought "wow it's been 70 years since this happened, and there's still bullet holes and smoke stains on the side of buildings? How can this be?"

We arrived in Warsaw at around 7 PM GMT. I was exhausted, but glad to be at my destination. I bid my friends a goodbye and we wished each other safe travels and kissed and hugged one another. After getting my luggage, my first order of business was to order food. There was a small concession stand, where I ordered baked chicken and fries with a coffee. The coffee still had the grounds in it, which I didn't like but the chicken was moist, with hints of paprika and garlic in it. After my meal, I found a taxi. In English and Polish I told him the address to my hostel. Driving very fast and what felt like reckless (at a stop light we touched bumpers with a car in front of us) he got me to my hostel.

I was greeted with melodic hellos and welcomes. Most everyone at the hostel was downstairs watching tv, so I decided to spend a few minutes downstairs to get to know everyone. I immediately started befriending two people in particular: a young man from S. Korea and an American teacher in her 30s. We start exchanging stories about our travels and our countries, and I begin to ask them about what they thought of Warsaw. The S. Korean then offers to order for the three of us a pizza. We get help from one of the staff members to help us order a pickle, kielbasa, bacon, cheese pizza which was actually one of the best pizzas ever!

I ended up going to bed happily at midnight thanks to my new friends at the hostel 😊



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