This morning started really slowly. I didn’t get home until much later than I’ve been out in several months, it’s hot and the wifi doesn’t really work. So I wasn’t really in the mood to leap up and go out into Warsaw. I spent the morning snoozing, writing, eating, scrolling and otherwise putting it off. Well, the longer you wait, the closer you get to the evening when it’s cooler, right? Well, I didn’t wait quite that long.

I went to get the tram and I got it all the way to Centrum, got on the metro and resumed my explorations from where I ended them yesterday. Actually, I pretty much just reproduced them but this time with a better idea of what I was seeing. I had a proper look at the Warsaw Uprising Memorial without a military ceremony on it, and the big green pillars of the government building behind it. I walked the shorter way to the Old Town and saw what I now know is the Barbakan, the old city gate (or is it – Hitler et all) and bits of the old city walls and then into the market square. Was it a bit quieter here today or was I imagining it? For a few minutes, I’d thought that tens of thousands of Swifties in town for the last three nights had all left but then I realised I was seeing the t-shirts on every other person. No, they’re still here, like me. Would Warsaw be quieter next weekend or last weekend? Or is it like any other European capital in August? Is it always going to be busy? Warsaw is a shock after all the other cities I’ve visited. Wroclaw was perhaps the busiest but it never felt quite like this and the tourism never really felt like it spilled beyond the market square even there. Poznan felt positively deserted in comparison.

I took some selfies with the Warsaw Mermaid, splashed my feet under a water pump (I’ve encountered a surprising number of these and I love them!) and headed towards Castle Square via a couple more churches and a few souvenir shops. In Castle Square, I found another old-fashioned photo stand but this one doesn’t even pretend to do any Victorian magic with his old-fashioned camera. You can see the modern lens hidden inside and he’s hardly taken it back to the table before the print-out appears, and he doesn’t pretend to hand-crank it out of the machine, either. That said, when I translated it, I wasn’t a robber in this one, but a welcome star tourist, so that’s nice.

I thought I’d go looking for a boat trip. The river is a bit of a distance from here so I needed to get to public transport. According to Google Maps, there was a bus stop two minutes away but Google Maps apparently doesn’t know that the entire middle of the New Town is closed and being dug up and that there are no buses. I diverted away from the New Town and into a park where I found a nice fountain and a bench and I sat there for a while. It’s hot, my feet are tired, I’ve done a lot of sightseeing in the last ten days and I wanted to sit for a while and let the fountain blow spray onto me every now and then. Once I got up, I encountered a man blowing giant bubbles and I did chase them and take photos of them and attempt to get them to land on my hand like a Disney princess making friends with a songbird. I didn’t chase them in the way the small children were but on the other hand, I didn’t see any other adult even pretending to notice they were there.

Now I was near a tram stop. But just up the road was a metro stop and that would take me to the river, pretty much directly to the boat trips. So I strolled up the road, chasing a delivery robot which was fun enough until I got past it and discovered it had a face. Ignore the delivery robot with a face, you can’t take it with you, it’s not coming on a boat trip with you.

The metro was line 2, which is identical to line 1 except the signs are in red instead of blue. The trains didn’t have any visible difference but the escalators had a kind of shiny ceiling with stars in it. I think this might be a line 2 thing because the station where I exited had the same thing. I came out into a patch of play fountains – grids of sprinklers spraying into the air. My bag is semi-waterproof and double-walled. My phone and camera will stay reasonably dry if I walk through it. And they did but yet again I mistook spray for “not that wet” and I was wrong.

There were no boat trips down at the river. There was a restaurant on a boat and a beach club on a barge moored alongside it and there were more eating places further down. On the other side of the river was an actual stretch of golden beach and there were signs showing that boat trips were available but there was no sign of any boat or any ticket. Well, I was near my usual tram line here. And I was near the Taylor Swift mural. Every day as I’d gone back and forth past here, I’d seen Swifties taking photos with it. I hadn’t intended to make a deliberate journey to it but I’d known that sooner or later, my explorations would naturally take me there and it had. So I crossed the road via a bridge that I swear is going to collapse in the next few months and found the right way up the side of the big bridge for my selfies. Then I had to get to the tram. It’s ridiculous how hard it can be to get to tram stops. It’s right there but you can’t just walk across the road and across the tracks. I had to go back under the bridge and take two attempts to pop up the correct staircase to end up at the tram stop and at the correct side.

I had vague hopes of maybe finding somewhere to swim or at least somewhere to sit in some nice water. Something like Liquidrom, maybe just a nice swimming pool. There are pools in Warsaw but they’re not nearby and there don’t seem to be spas, or not the kind with hot tubs and saunas, and anyway, the saunas would probably be textile-free. Come to that, there’s a spa in my very hotel but it’s the kind where you go for massages and treatments, not the kind where you spend a few hours relaxing in hot water. Bring on Friday.

And that’s all I did. Trying to get to know five cities in ten days is harder work than it sounds. I’m sure Warsaw is very interesting but either I just don’t have the capacity to be that interested by it or it really is just my least favourite of the five cities I’ve seen on this trip. If I’m coming back to Poland, it’s going to be in the winter and I think it would be to Wroclaw. I think there’s plenty there I still haven’t seen or done, or not done properly because it was too hot and I was too tired after not sleeping in that apartment with no air conditioning. I liked Wroclaw despite that. But mainland Europe for winters now. Iceland and Sapmi for summers.