Warsaw, Poland

I hated Warsaw the moment I arrived. A lot of the distaste had to do with the time I had rocked up at: rush hour. Hassled Polish commuters were milling about the station and thick traffic jams pumping out fumes choked the thoroughfares for each and every ugly, identical grey block I passed. The only ray of light on my drab journey to the hostel was seeing what looked to me uncannily like the building from Ghostbusters.

Luckily, the area to the north of the hostel was an entirely different kettle of worms. A regal-looking throughfare lined with Christmas lights (these Orthodoxers milk Chrimbo for all its worth and celebrate it well into late January), it stretched up past the university towards the (heavily reconstructed and restored) town square, a gorgeous little location with lots of nooks and crannies to explore – a world away from the Soviet monstrosity I had first seen, and as a result I retracted some of my hate for the capital.

I sat on a bench in the town square alongside two homeless people, blending in perfectly with my beard, vagabond coat and hat – er, apart from the fact I had a Macbook on my knee and was working away merrily. One of the glorious things I had discovered about the entity that was the ever-present old-fashioned Polish town square was that it more often than not came with a modern, free high-speed wifi connection.

As the temperature dropped, I moved inside to a German-style Brewhouse, borrowing an internet connection of the cafe next door through the wall and fuelling my work with a big plate of steak and beer brewed on the premises and chatting on-and-off with a friend and ex-workmate from home via video messaging. My kind of office!

I continued to make Warsaw my office for a couple more days, albeit shunning the exotic working locations of benches in restored market squares and German beerhalls for the more practical dormbed office in the hostel. There I met a lovely Polish girl, who was one of the many who had left their home country in 2004 when Poland joined the EU to study and work abroad. She had settled in Ireland, and had picked up a strong Polish-Irish accent (“Ayn denn oi dyd tat…”). I described how Polish people were generally welcome in the UK and liked for their hard-working attitude, but she told me the Polish media had painted a completely different story: how the Polish were not liked and that we’d had enough of them. Perhaps the consensus lies somewhere in between; I’ve certainly seen British bus drivers standing around disparaging their Polish colleagues, and even passengers frustrated with their lack of English comprehension (the same passengers who will go off to Spain and speak English, mind you), as well as people praising the work ethic and honesty of Polish builders and plumbers and the like.

With a good portion of work under my belt I felt it was time to march onwards from Poland. I’d enjoyed my brief time here, and the handful of Polish people I’d encountered had not been the misery guts I’d expected. The few cities I’d seen had been a welcome mix of old-style charm and modern, youthful vibe. The food had been… interesting, and my last meal in Poland was memorable for all the wrong reasons. At the dubious-smelling long-distance bus station in Warsaw I spent my remaining zloty on a pizza which looked worse than something I’d made in my Home Economics class at the age of 12, and tasted it too. But it filled my belly for the long overnight journey on a rattling bus up to the capital city of the lowest of the three Baltic states: Vilnius, Lithuania.