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Warsaw is a fascinating city. I am not Polish but have spent about 3 months there over the past 20 years. It’s been a cool experience watching it continue to transform. There’s a very interesting mix of surviving architecture, rebuilt, reimagined, communist, capitalist contemporary, and urban renewal. Here’s also a very young energy there due to all the schools and being a magnet for young people across the country to start their careers.

A little gem example: there’s a communist era train platform that’s been reimagined as a Bangkok night market. In a nearby rail yard building is a very good pinball museum with playable antiques.

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reimagined as a Bangkok night market

Sounds like the Thai government’s decades long program of soft-diplomacy through food is working.

https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/food-diplo...

My bet is that is has more to do with the Vietnamese (largest non-European) minority in Poland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_people_in_Poland?wp...

> more to do with the Vietnamese (largest non-European) minority in Poland

Vietnamese are not Thai. They are entirely different cultures.

It's like saying a Poles are just knockoff Russians.

Vietnamese are proud of their culture and gladly export it, just like the Thai diaspora.

The train car conversion was probably done by Poles who formerly backpacked in Thailand

Parent commenter doesn't suggest that, just brings up the fact that there's indeed a large Vietnamese diaspora living in Warszawa.

> A little gem example: there’s a communist era train platform that’s been reimagined as a Bangkok night market. In a nearby rail yard building is a very good pinball museum with playable antiques.

  > Sounds like the Thai government’s decades long program of soft-diplomacy through food is working

     > My bet is that is has more to do with the Vietnamese (largest non-European) minority in Poland

pndy’s comment is correct. I just poorly phrased my comment, sorry for that!

Many sushi restaurants around the world are run by non-Japanese Asians (who often have a separate menu for their ethnicity than can be asked for if you know). Where I live (in the Washington, D.C. area) most Latin American people are Salvadorans, but they mostly run Mexican restaurants as that's the Latin American food that sells.

I am aware of that. I visited Thailand several times and even attempted learning Thai (besides planning to move there for work in mid 2010s). I don’t live in Poland any more but I know several Poles with Vietnamese roots, hence my assumption/comment regarding the night market.

Apologies if the way I phrased my comment was somewhat confusing! As a Pole who studied Persian I can see how people might expect ignorance in that matter.

(pndy’s comment is correct)

Speaking of 'communist era train platform's, one of the many interesting architectural flourishes that you can find in Poland is how the names of some of the train stations around Warsaw are embedded in the structure of the station. An example can be seen at [1]

Another little architectural flourish I love are the 'latarenki adresowe' (lit. 'address lanterns') you can see in the cities. They're a little lightbox that shows a silhouette of the street name and number. The older metal and glass ones you can find around the stare miasto in Krakow are especially beautiful. Some examples are [2] [3].

Some of the old buildings in central Krakow have really awesome relief art on the facade. This page has some amazing examples: [4]

A great blog about history and architecture in Polish cities is Miasta Rytm: https://miastarytm.pl/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warszawa_Mi%C4%99dzylesie_rail...

[2]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c0/c3/10/c0c310bbb6b6ebed0a51...

[3]: https://grochow.pl/web/files/article/cdf1ecfd640977b795cdd86...

[4]: https://miastarytm.pl/godla-krakowskich-kamienic-lat-30-xx-w...

the only Polish person I know of that mentioned Warsaw recently said "no way - stay away from it" .. no idea why

Rural/conservative person maybe?

My sister lives there with her husband and two kids, she likes it, it’s expensive though.

Coming from a German part of Poland[1] to Warsaw, a Russian city, it actually seems conservative. It was the first place I saw someone pray the rosary on public transport... kneeling. It blew my mind.

There is also a lot of fetishisation of its history by conservatives, since history in Polish schools is told in a very martyr way, and history of Warsaw, its monuments and all that play well into it. If anything, it’s a very good place for conservatives.

[1]: partitions and other shenanigans of Polish history.

> since history in Polish schools is told in a very martyr way

I think that's the perception of Polish history pretty much everywhere except Russia, Ukraine, maybe Lithuania? I'm genuinely curious as to what other theories of Polish history exist, especially in Poland.

I think outside of Poland people think of it as a victim mostly in the context of the XX century, but inside, the martyrology begins much earlier and was the leading ideological current in the XIX century. It just seems we have a long tradition of not wanting to own up to our faults, always ready to blame someone else for our misfortunes. This also jives with the catholic doctrine of noble suffering.

Personally I’m a fan of taking responsibility. And in the context of falling into partitions we did have a role in that internally the country was a mess, conflicted and for sale. We could learn something from our western neighbours when it comes to forming some unity and valuing work/grit over aristocratic navel-gazing.

I would argue most of the mess of the 17th-18th centuries comes from not having a strong centralized government at a time when that meant having an absolute monarch or emperor. Sure the back-biting oligarchy was not ideal, but neither was the alternative, at least to most modern audiences. Getting it's act together as a nation would have been an anachronistic thought until well after the first partition. So while wallowing in victimhood isn't helpful, neither are/were Poland's issues entirely self-inflicted.

One somewhat weird aspect of it I encountered: my Polish grandfather (born in Łódź in the 1920s and fled as a refugee at the beginning of WW2) always told of how his experience growing up Jewish in Poland was that Poles were virulently antisemitic and he didn’t really consider them any better than the Nazis (on that specific account).

I multiple times had exchanges online where Poles absolutely refused to acknowledge any antisemitism was ever present and that everything was the Germans’ fault (to the point where if there was any it was “due to German influences” and other such weird reasoning). I don’t consider anyone at fault for something their ancestors did, I just didn’t expect such total denial of wrongdoings before encountering it.

It is something that was present everywhere.

People tend to value their own group than the other. Jews tended to keep to themselves, which had two reasons: they were forced to by laws in many countries (e.g. Ashkenazi group evolved to have good math skills mostly because they were forbidden from owning land etc. but were allowed to be merchants) and by Jews themselves tending to one another and keeping outsiders out (which is quite natural for any group, but not to that extent). Consider what happens in most cases when w given ethnicity moves out of their country - they integrate in century or two (see USA). Jews do not, at least orthodox ones (which were majority before I think).

Similar thing happens with other immigrants - if they don't integrate, they are feared. If they have different religion even more so.

Countries outside of Germany during (and before) WWII didn't have state level killings of those "alien" groups.

It can be illegal to ague otherwise.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42898882.amp

> I multiple times had exchanges online where Poles absolutely refused to acknowledge any antisemitism was ever present and that everything was the Germans’ fault

Perhaps it's just that antisemitism didn't stand out among other -isms and frankly paled in comparison to nazi industrialized genocide.

Make no mistake - it was there - but pre-WW2 Poland was actually fairly diverse with ethnic Poles being 69% of the population and the rest consisting of (population numbers in descending order) Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and Germans.

It was a melting pot of mutual antipathy.

Case in point: to this day in literature there are two terms for the largest of these minorities - Ukrainians and the Rus' (the generally agreed on definition notwithstanding), the difference being that the latter did not display ambitions of forming an independent state.

For a fledgling state any such notion was of course dangerous and Ukrainians were treated in accordance to that (badly).

There's a long history of persecutions of Jews in Europe. They found Poland relatively liberal and settled there. Germans chose Poland to make it their graveyard. Poland is not immune from antisemitism, but there is also a long history or Poles and Jews living together and Poles helping Jews during the Holocaust. Poland was also used as a route to transport tens of thousands of Jews from the failing Soviet Union during Gorbachev rule when Israel set up a resettlement programme.

Antisemitism has always been used by those seeking to gain power through ripping up the society to shreds and it was not and is not limited to Poland.

And for Jews specifically, it might sound weird, but in Poland they were actually better off than average citizen.

It's just an artifact of our history: even in 18th century, before partitioning of Poland the social structures we like this: Polish nobles > Jewish bankers, merchants, clerks, lawyers, doctors > Polish peasants. This structure persisted through 19th century into the 1920s and 1930s. You could say, that Poland basically outsourced most of the middle-class jobs to Jews.

In the late 1930s Poland actually ran kind of "affirmative action" to get more Polish students accepted to Polish universities, which had pretty high percentage of Jewish students: 15-25%, compared to 8.5% of Jews in general population.

All this naturally created some outrage against Jews, with Polish people feeling like a second class citizens in their own country, sometimes (but rarely) resulting in violence.

You may be surprised to learn that if you go to the garden of the Yad Vashem institute the trees there have tags with names of Poles. Each tree is planted for the person who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Here are the statistics https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/statistics.html Those numbers do not only matter as statistics, there was a law in place in occupied Poland that allowed the whole family to be sentenced to death if one of the members was caught helping Jews. Herr Schindler was not the only person who was saving Jews.

My grandfather was talking about his childhood, before WW2.

And I’m not at all surprised to know there are many Poles that saved Jews in WW2 - there are also a lot of Germans! I’m sure individually a lot of Poles were and are fine people.

But at least according to my late grandfather it sounded like it was pretty common to experience anti-semitism as well (my grandfather grew up in an ultra orthodox family so was easily identified on the street as Jewish - he became secular during the war).

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I can't ask him what he meant as he died almost 20 years ago, but I believe he was speaking emotionally as a reaction to being attacked as a kid as well as some neighbours helping the nazis by turning over some people from his family that were trying to hide. Of course the Nazis are to blame for the industrialised systematic murder they introduced to Europe (not only again Jews) and I never claimed Poland as a nation was as bad as the Third Reich was (and either way I don't condemn people for the sins of their ancestors, especially those that were done before they were even born).

There are some facts of note here, not only emotions. You saw the thing primarily through your grandfather's lens, or kinda reconciling it with the "other side" online (my guesswork), but I offer starkly different perspective.

1. There were times and nations where "anti-semitism, period" was a complete political program that won legal democratic elections.

2. In Poland this program was always in substantial minority, geography and economics nonwithstanding.

3. People susceptible to such programs are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. The program is about labels, but it breeds the hate towards an actual neighbor. Even if the idea is changed to "it's all because of Zambians". Or Poles.

Poland was partitioned in XVIII century by three similarly backwards neighboring Eastern European powers: Russia, Prussia and Austria. They were more efficient that Poland though, because they were ruled by ruthless tyrants, while Poland was a democracy of the nobles, with all the worst traits that can occur in democracies (triumph of small egoisms, power and votes for sale, domination of politics by few richest oligarchs who don’t care about the country etc.). It’s basically a great pre-modern era cautionary tale of how a democracy can degenerate to the levels of complete state failure.

Regarding the rosary, I would rather guess Warsaw being the seat of government attracts lots of fringe types who come there to protest. I've last been living there in 2019 and I remember that the political climate was already heating up back then, with religious groups protesting in various places spontaneously - groups with loudspeakers at entrances to public transit, trucks driving around blasting anti-gay slogans all day, random marches of people in knight gowns carrying that certain picture of Jesus in a lavish crown that's a dogwhistle among certain ultra-religious groups - I've seen all of that, and still I would consider Warsaw to be overwhelmingly liberal in comaprison to the rest of the country.

One exception is the city's football team of course - but football in this country is synonymous with ultra-nationalism.

Ever been to Oxford Street in London where one preacher or another is banging on about god?

Not sure, it depends what you like. Putting it on rural/conservative is pretty low. There are more progressive people outside Warsaw than inside.

I like old buildings, so prefer Cracow as it wasn't rebuilt, the old buildings there are really old, not built in past 80 years.

Also capital dwellers tend to have such self-centric attitude that makes other people upset (Warsaw is known as the "default city", because in some early days of internet when some of them asked about where to buy stuff, they didn't mention in which city, they assumed it was Warsaw).

There are also more conservative people outside Warsaw than inside, simply because there are less than 2m people and Poland has 38m people.

It’s one thing to prefer another city (because it happened to have fewer bombs dropped on it?) it’s another thing to say “stay away.”

Polish population is quite distributed across many middle sized cities. Warsaw has a population of less than 2 million but next one Cracow has ~800k. For many Warsaw will be still too big also considering it has only 2 metro lines. I usually recommend my foreign friends to go visit Cracow, Wroclaw or Gdansk - all the also more interesting for tourism since they haven't been as much destroyed as Warsaw during WW2.

Gdansk was destroyed in WW2:

"Ruins all around"

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/9QUBrz3ybHcAzg

Isn't hatred of one's own capital city by all non-residents pretty much universal across Europe?

Just spent a couple weeks in Poland, including Krakow, Wroclaw, and Warsaw. In general it's considered an uninteresting city to visit as a tourist... of course as detailed here, the historic parts have been rebuilt, so what you're seeing isn't authentic. As well it's considered to be a modern, Western European'ish city, so the idea it's not a great representation of Polish culture.

That said, I enjoyed my time there the most. I love the fact that this city that was ravaged by the Nazis w/ an Eastern Bloc past has emerged as this beacon of resilience and modernity. The part that was hit the most, the Wola district - perhaps the most by the Nazis over any other part of Europe - was the most modern. It has some really great museums and public artworks.

Also to note, the areas that were rebuilt were done so well that it's not obvious to me the difference between those and the actual medieval structures in the other cities. The old towns in all had a pretty similar flavor and of course the facades of these structures have likely been updated/fixed/repainted multiple times over the centuries.

I don’t usually recommend that tourists visit Warsaw for their first trip to Poland. There are plenty of interesting things to see there, but an international tourist is going to have a certain expectation of what they will want to see, which is mostly Kraków’s medieval center and the Jewish history. That is course is a very narrow slice of Poland, which is a rapidly developing modern European powerhouse in its own right.

Another interesting thing is that almost all “old” things are materially mostly new, like the Ship of Theseus. Most structures take regular refurbishment to stay standing. So in a way, while Warsaw Old Town is materially new, the form is old, so it is still in some sense old. This is in contrast to Gdańsk’s old town which are facades slapped on top of communist block buildings meant to create a Polish themed city out of the former German city, much more Disney than architectural conservation.

It's where power and money converge, because of its status as the capital city of Poland. This gives its residents a feeling of exceptionalism. It's a typical Eastern European capital city where you go to join the corporate rat race. Just like London and the rest of the UK, you see a huge gap in income and quality of life between Warsaw and the rest of Poland. That's why the rest of the country dislikes Warsaw, just like the rest of the UK dislikes London.

> communist era train platform that’s been reimagined as a Bangkok night market.

Do you have google maps link please?

Here you go. Opens end of the week and over the weekend: https://maps.app.goo.gl/v3HFoRTtUPoug8yq8?g_st=com.google.ma...

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