Since we had a patriotic day yesterday, we decided that today would have a different theme. I had thought about going to the town of Torun, which is the birthplace of Mikołaj Kopernik (1473 – 1543), well-known for his theory that the sun is at the centre of the universe. It has museums etc, and I thought it might be a nice trip to the country. But it is a 3hrs train ride, so we changed our minds, and instead of Torun, we headed to the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw.
There were hordes of school kids, but we fronted the ticket desk, only to be told that there were no tickets until 15:00 tomorrow, and that they had to be bought on-line. (I had looked this morning, but saw nothing about no other option) So we sat down and tried for 30mins to negotiate the webpage on the phone, with no success, and having expressed dissatisfaction at this and our great journey to get here, were directed to another window, where a reservation was made. (When we got home, we found that one of our attempts was actually successful, so we have 4 places now.
. So we had to go back to patriotism, and went to the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, to find out more about the events of 75yrs ago. No audio-guides were left, but most of the information was in English. Still we found it a very disjointed presentation, and with lots of details about place and people names that we didn't know, we got lost rather quickly.
This old guy was signing programs, but we thought he was not really old enough to have been involved.
A full sized replica of a US Liberator bomber (minus one wing).
These messages after the war from resistance survivors were interesting.
Walking through a fake sewer, which were the underground highways of the resistance.
We did like the 3D plane flight over Warsaw that was taken in Sept 1945, showing the ruined city. We were able to locate some places we know, which made it more interesting.
So we stuck with it, and skimmed around bits and read others, and finished up after 2.5hrs.
On the way home we visited the Synagogue, the only one still standing of about 600 in 1945. It has been rebuilt, and now has a congregation of about 400.
While I was getting dinner, there were speeches, music, singing, happening in the plaza down below. Tomorrow I will find out that it was to commemorate an African jazz musician who served in the Resistance, having made his home in Poland.
While writing the FB page, and googling bits I needed, I came across
http://www.warsawrising.eu/
and spent the rest of the evening looking at it, step by step. We probably should have looked at it at home, rather than after the museum.
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