Warsaw without a plan: the same restaurant again

With a few spare hours in Warsaw, we had one practical objective for the evening: find dinner. Everything else was allowed to happen on the way.

We started near the Saxon Garden as blue hour settled over the centre. The broad ceremonial space beside it felt almost oversized after the surrounding streets, with the black Smolensk memorial at one side and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier facing the square.

From there we drifted onto Krakowskie Przedmieście. Much of the route was familiar from earlier visits, which was exactly why I had no interest in turning the evening into another sightseeing checklist. I noticed smaller things instead.

Farther north, the Royal Castle and Castle Square marked the entrance to the Old Town. The castle was familiar too, so this time it worked more as a waypoint than a destination. We kept walking until the evening finally delivered its main objective.

Then came the surprise. We opened a restaurant door, looked around and both realised at once that we had eaten there about ten years earlier. Apparently people do not change much. A generous portion of good pierogi suggested that perhaps this was not a problem.

After dinner the Old Town was still lively. Its brick walls look convincingly medieval at night, although the story is more complicated: more than 85 per cent of Warsaw's historic centre was destroyed during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. The reconstruction used surviving structures, archival material and historical documentation to recover the earlier urban form, later recognised by UNESCO.

On the walk back south, familiar streets made the details more interesting than the landmarks themselves: the Baroque façade of the Visitationist Church, four Atlantes carrying the balcony of the Tyszkiewicz-Potocki Palace, and Athena and Urania flanking the University of Warsaw gate.