Earlier this year I went to Poland for the weekend with some friends of mine. We arrived late Friday night in Warsaw and stayed until Sunday evening for a simple weekend away.

The Palace of Culture and Science, our first sight in Warsaw as we disembarked from the bus.

We quickly made our way to the hostel and dropped our stuff off before going out for some dinner at a classic Polish restaurant. All 4 of us got something different so we could all share, but I think we were too busy eating it to take any pictures! I can’t remember what we each had, but the pierogi (dumplings) were like biting into heaven itself!

After some drinks, full and tired, we made our way to our hostel to retire for the night. As soon as we got there, though, we decided to go back out and get some cocktails at a bar near our hostel.

I can’t recall the name of the bar, and the cocktails themselves weren’t really amazing, but the bartender was pretty funny. He was very intent on making custom creations just for us, so we all kind of gave him some pointers and he very enthusiastically made them for us, even if they weren’t that great in the end.

We then finally made our way to the hostel and actually went to sleep for the night.

 

 

We then checked out the Warsaw barbican and walls which used to defend the city back in the day. The walls actually were only used to defend the city once, as artillery weaponry became more prominent right about when it got finished. Oops!

We then went into a very quaint cafe where we ordered brunch.

I was feeling mildly hung over and wanted some juice. I forget exactly what I ordered, but it was grapefruit juice or something like that. I remember the waitress asking me if I wanted a small or large one. I told her I wanted a large one, thinking to myself, “Hmm, that’s odd. I don’t recall seeing a size option in the menu…” Lo and behold, she must have misheard me and she just brought me a pint of beer. It’s always 5 o’clock somewhere!

Afterwards, we just walked around downtown for the rest of day until, due to our lack of sleep from the previous night, we went back to the hostel for a nap for the majority of the afternoon. After waking up, I was adamant about going to the single place I wanted to see the most in Warsaw: PiwPaw.

 

PiwPaw is a bar that a few people recommended to me. With 100 beers on tap and being open 24/7, what’s not to love?!

 

I tried a few beers, with some being better than others. I unfortunately failed to write down the actual names of each beer—maybe one of the things I didn’t like about the bar is that the information for each beer was a little lacking, but that’s hard to improve when you have 100 beers all crammed on one wall—and as such, I can’t provide that detailed information, but I tried :-).

The first beer I tried was a Milk Stout, and that was actually my favorite and I will post about it next week.

Another beer I had was a Smoky IPA
 I love smoke beers, and I love IPAs, and I thought this would be a match made in heaven. I found it neither smoky nor hoppy, like an IPA should be. Instead, I smelled what seemed like cleaning chemicals and it didn’t taste much better. I am glad I only got a sampler of this one.

I also had an American Barleywine
 Despite the name, it was polish, and considerably more expensive than the other ones (I think it also had a higher alcohol content). It definitely had a taste akin to that of whiskey, and you could feel the burn as it went down. I didn’t care for it, but I don’t really care for the taste of whiskey. I am sure someone who loves whiskey would adore this beer.

After drinking there for a bit, my friends dragged me away from my happy place and we walked around until we found a club that didn’t have a line that stretched halfway to Russia.

 The club we found was actually pretty cool as it had that classic disco floor with all the panels on the floor that lit up. We danced for a while and eventually made our way back to the hostel in the early morning hours as the sun was rising. What a Saturday!

While walking around Warsaw the previous day, we saw an advertisement for a haunted house in Poland, which we ended up going into. It lasted about 20 minutes and was exciting, to say the least. It was more or less a typical haunted house with us trying to get through the house while being chased by people with (chainless) chainsaw and other stuff. You didn’t just walk through it, though, and sometimes you needed to solve little riddles with black lights to find the key in order to proceed, among other things.

At one point, someone scared me pretty good and I jumped to my left, accidentally smashing my friend’s face (her head is as high as my shoulder) before I fell into the wall, further scraping my shoulder. My friend luckily didn’t get a black eye, but the area around her eye was obviously agitated. Sorry again, M!

 Us after escaping the haunted house (only 3 of us went in as the 4th wasn’t feeling quite up for it at the moment)

After that, we just leisurely walked around Warsaw, eventually making our way to the East side of the river.

After walking around for a bit, in order to not stress ourselves, we made our way to the airport with plenty of time to spare for our evening flight.

We were waiting around, and of course, our flight was delayed. The 4 of us were standing pretty far away from the terminal door, completely to the back of the room actually. The line ended up coming up near us, and wrapping around us before it eventually somehow morphed into an elongated blob of disorderly people waiting to go through the gate.

As the four of us stood in a small circle with our backpacks laying on the floor in between us, the gate finally opened and the crowd started to inch forward. Since we were in no rush to go stand in a line outside the plane, we just hung back and let everyone else rush to the front. One jerkoff decided, instead of stepping half a meter to either side of us, to barrel right through our group, trampling our backpacks in the process. He made some stupid comment about us standing in the way, which was total BS because not only would a simple, courteous sidestep have avoided us, but we were there, way in the back, before anyone else had even started queuing up. What was left of the line was still going around us so he actually just cut a bunch of people while unnecessarily stomping over our stuff and being incredibly rude. I don’t understand why some people have to be so unpleasant and angry—he’s the reason people get into fist fights while 10,000 meters in the air.

I just hope the rest of his week was as pleasant as he was.

Other than that last little event, it was a great weekend, and I loved Warsaw by the end of it. I would like to go back just to check out the other haunted house (since they also had a haunted mental asylum). But let’s not kid ourselves, I would gladly go back just to visit the bar again as well!