Tours in Warszawa

Warsaw is a reconstruction, and that is the point. More than eighty-five per cent of the centre was destroyed in the war. The Old Town went up after 1945.

A city rebuilt from paintings

The rebuilding worked from Bernardo Bellotto's views of the eighteenth-century city. Twenty-three of his canvases hang in the Royal Castle. They were the drawings.

• The Old Town — on the UNESCO list since 1980 for the reconstruction itself, not for its age.
• The Royal Castle — put back between 1971 and 1984, paid for by public donation.
• The Palace of Culture — Stalin's gift of 1955, and no longer the tallest thing in town.
• POLIN — on the ground of the ghetto, telling a thousand years rather than five.
• Praga — over the river, and the district that came through the war standing.

What is worth buying here is a route, not a ticket. The ground is flat and the distances are short. Most of the story sits on plaques and rebuilt facades.

The free week

Warsaw sorts its free admissions by weekday, and Thursday carries most of them.

• Thursday — POLIN, the Museum of Warsaw and the Warsaw Rising Museum, among a couple of dozen others.
• Tuesday — the National Museum's permanent galleries. The Rising Museum is shut that day, so do not pair them.
• Wednesday — the Royal Castle's state rooms, though you still collect a ticket at the desk.
• Summer Sundays — free Chopin recitals at the monument in Łazienki, at noon and at four.
• Friday and Saturday nights — the fountain show below the Old Town, free, and timed to the dark rather than the clock.

Milk bars and the price of things

• Bar mleczny. Canteens the state still subsidises, at about seventy per cent of the ingredient cost on dairy and meatless dishes. Soup is 7 to 12 zloty, a main 18 to 32.
• Read the grams. The number beside a dish is its weight, not its price. A portion of pierogi is around 250 grams.
• Pay first. Order and pay at the till, take the slip to the hatch, carry your own tray.
• Duże or małe. Draught beer comes at half a litre or 0.3, and the words are the sizes.
• Weekday lunch. Set obiad menus run from noon to about four at a fraction of the evening price.

The night, and which bank

• Praga. Ząbkowska and the old Koneser distillery, rougher and cheaper than the centre, and the brick is genuinely pre-war.
• The centre. Nowy Świat and the lanes off it, plus the river boulevards through the summer.
• Shops stop at ten. No shop, kiosk or filling station in the city sells alcohol between ten at night and six. Bars and restaurants are not affected.

Practical

• Weather. January hovers around freezing and midwinter is dark by four. July afternoons reach the mid twenties.
• From Chopin airport. Ten kilometres out: the S2 and S3 trains or bus 175 reach the centre in about half an hour. A 75-minute ticket at 4.40 zloty covers it; a taxi is around 50.
• Modlin. The cheap-flight airport is 40 kilometres north, and getting in means a shuttle and a train.
• Chopin's heart. Sealed in a pillar of the Holy Cross church on Krakowskie Przedmieście, and free to see.