First off I would just like to say: I had, in Warsaw, one of the bitchin’-est hotels in the known fucking universe. I realise that made-up word was appallingly punctuated, but frankly this place was so bitchin’ I really don’t care. My room was substantially larger than my tiny studio in NY, and was lent a feeling of immensity by the incredibly high ceilings and expansive windows. My only disappointment is that the shit-cool Georgian-looking balcony outside said window was totally inaccessible. I can say this definitively because I spent 10 minutes trying to get onto it without breaking any glass. Alas, I could not sing on my balcony to the night-time streets of Warsaw Disney-style. What a pity, I was hoping to make friends with a cartoon animal.

I have always liked Poland. I first visited back in 2005, when food was still cheap and they hadn’t joined the EU. People say that Warsaw is ugly because it was razed to the ground in World War 2 and re-built the way things were built in the following few decades, namely hideous grey blocks of concrete. Largely speaking this is true, with the notable exception of the old town. You would think that the old town was the part of Warsaw that not a single psychotic dictator managed to incinerate. If you did think this though, you would be wrong.

The old town was the part of Warsaw that the denizens of the city decided to rebuild from scratch _after_ the aforementioned incineration. Approximately 85% of Warsaw is reputed to have been utterly destroyed. From old photographs and pre-war architectural drawings, they reconstructed an chunk of the city. They resurrected a goddamn palace, along with recreating a huge amount of the artwork and statuary that had been in the original.

Was this a massive waste of resources? Possibly. But I like to think it’s the kind of thing I would have done. To me it feels more like a message. “You can burn our city to the ground, you can kill us, and torture us, and enslave us. But at the end of the day when it’s all over, we will still be us. We fought every step of the way, and we honour our heroes. So fuck you Nazi piss-ants…. Now, time to go drink vodka until we puke on our own shoes!”

Now that’s a country I can relate to.