The World As I See it

 Despite the cold, rainy weather we wanted to make the most of our last day and decided to check out Praga. Once a separate city on the other side of the Vistula, Praga was once known as an unsafe part of town. Things have improved in recent years and it is home to the vodka museum and at least one of Warsaw's best parks. Taking the metro under the river, we started with a walk to the Koneser Centre which was pretty quiet given the weather and time of day. We checked out some of the street art and grabbed lunch at a cafe. The Neon Museum sounded interesting, so we walked toward the nearest transit hub and stumbled across a record store that was small compared to the Sam the Recors Man of my youth but offered a diverse selection of rock, pop, jazz, Polish artists and more. My daughter found some treasures for her collection. Hopping the bus, we followed Google's directions to find the Neon Museum... and came to a boarded up parking lot. Off we trudged in a round about route that...

Warsaw has seen more than its share of warfare. The incursions of Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia (with the Austro-Hungarian Empire getting in on the show) between 1772 and 1795 effectively erased the country from the map of Europe until after the struggles of the First World War.  The invasions by Stalin and Hitler in 1939, with the ensuing violence, was in a class of its own.  A monument to those lost during the Soviet occupation in 1939 sits alongside a busy Warsaw thoroughfare. During the Nazi occupation, the Jewish population was all but liquidated, and Poles were killed in the thousands. Memorials to the Polish underground are tucked into locations all over the city. A year after the Warsaw ghetto uprising, in 1944, the Soviet army arrived on the opposite banks of the Vistula and called for the citizens to rise up against the German occupation. W Hour was 5 p.m. on August 1. The excellent Warsaw Uprising Museum covers the turbulent 63 day action that all but...

Visuals that captured my imagination without explanation.