Apr 262014
 

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Former Pope John Paul will be officially canonized on Sunday so there are major celebrations all over Poland, his native country. As we drove into Warsaw the city is awash in banners and posters.

Today it is raining. We are staying adjacent to the oldest part of Warsaw, founded at the turn of the 13th century, so it makes it very easy to meander the cobblestone streets among the reconstructed buildings. The streets follow a regular grid pattern typical of medieval towns and are laid along the original patterns before the bombings of 1939 and 1944. Every district or neighborhood has a memorial or monument to either the fallen, the atrocities or to individual heroism. Warsaw does not intend to forget or to let future generations forget.

In the Old Town, the Royal Castle which was the official residence of Polish monarchs, is in the Castle Square at the entrance to Old Town. It was almost entirely destroyed but literally arose from the ashen rubble entirely funded from donations of the Polish people who saw it as a symbol of their own resiliency. The Castle is shown in the above collage.

We are also very close to the University which we will visit tomorrow.

Yet another important Warsaw historic district is the” New Town” which  was established at the turn of the 14th century as an independent city and after 1791, due to the tenets of the Constitution which unified Lithuania and Poland,  New Town was incorporated into  Warsaw.

We did our bus ride over view of the city to get oriented and today in part, to stay dry and still sight see. The last collage is through a drizzly windshield as
Warsawians head home from work.

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Carmelite Church Built in 1661

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Copernicus and Copernicus Hopefulls at the Stazic Palace

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Chopin Family Home

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Old Town Square

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Staying Dry on the “Royal Way”

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Swordfighter Mermaid

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Awash but Inside the Bus