It was grey and kind of miserable when I got up, which was great news – it was cooler today! I packed my stuff, still dithering over whether to leave my luggage at reception or whether to take it with me. How heavy was it, how annoying was it, how annoying was it to have to detour back here later on? But the problem solved itself by there being no sign whatsoever of life at reception. The luggage wasn’t that heavy. I took it with me.

It wasn’t just cool and grey outside. It was raining. Wonderful! Temperatures I can function in! I had a vague plan that I might go to the Neon Museum. Unless I wanted to start diving into museums, I’d more or less seen everything on the “must do in Warsaw” lists but this had popped up on an “other things to do in Warsaw” list and it looked interesting and as a bonus, it was inside. That’s the problem with cities, the total lack of things that are inside when it rains if you’re not into museums. The Neon Museum was one bus stop down from Wschodnia station, where I’d arrived on Friday so I got the same bus in the other direction, jumped off where Google Maps told me to and then made my way through the streets to the museum. Which was closed. Well, it’s open every day but it doesnt open until 12 and it was barely 10. I wasn’t standing there in the rain for 2 hours. I went back to the bus stop, returned to the station and left my luggage in a storage locker. It’s not that it was heavy or inconvenient, although it was – it was more that it’s not all that waterproof. At least, my personal item bag with all my particularly non-waterproof stuff in it is made of ripstop nylon, which I always describe as “waterproof like a tent – fine as long as you don’t touch the inside but you can’t use a bag without touching the inside”.

Unladen, I found a tram that was going to the city centre and discovered, a bit to my surprise, that only two or three stops down the line, it stopped outside the stadium, which has become one of my major landmarks now. I jumped off the 7 and got on a 9 instead and went through to Centrum, which is the metro station I know best, the big shopping centre and also the nearest stop for the Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw’s Stalinskie Vysotki, the big Stalin skyscraper. As is usual in any city with something tall and weird, the joke goes that the best view in the city is from its viewing platform, because it’s the one place in Warsaw you can’t see it. So up I went.

Now, maybe I could have picked a day when there wasn’t a cloud sitting just above Warsaw when I could actually appreciate views most of the way to the nearest international border but the views weren’t bad u there. There are bars across all the windows so you can’t fall off and people have decided to put love locks on them. This is probably the least romantic place in the entire city, the unwelcome unwanted Soviet monument and I really hope no one did the traditional thing and threw the key over the edge. In Wroclaw, the city authorities removed love locks (allegedly 20 tons of the things!) from a historic bridge and then put a gnome at each end to tell people that the city gnomes disapprove. It’s mostly worked except that now people put locks on the gnomes. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting love locks on the Palace of Culture. Inside, there’s a tiny cafe where you just find a seat somewhere around the hallway, there’s a mini souvenir shop (too mini!), there’s a photobooth which I think pastes you onto a backdrop of the skyscraper, a steel beam where you can have your photo taken as if you’re having lunch atop a skyscraper (or falling off it, or just smiling for the camera) and a couple of machines that give you a shiny gold coin with a picture of the building on it. I wanted one of those – I like to have things in my scrapbooks that aren’t just paper but I hadn’t been particularly inspired by any of the machines I’d found along the way. One with the square in Poznan or Wroclaw would have been nice. Some of the churches. But this would do the job! The trouble was, it only took coins and I didn’t have anywhere neaer enough. I’ve used card 98% of this trip and most of the Polish cash is still tied up in two 50zl notes. I broke one by buying a hot chocolate – wouldn’t have thought most of this week that I’d ever want a hot chocolate but it’s freezing 30 storeys up on a rainy day. Then I broke up a 10zl note by buying some postcards, which I really should have done before this morning, and then I had enough coins to buy a gold coin. It’s very pretty and worth the effort.

What did I do after that? Oh, I took the metro back to the Old Town and wandered around a bit. It’s all a lot quieter today. I don’t know if it’s the fact that it’s Monday, the rain or the fact that most of the Swifties have gone home but I could actually take a selfie with the Warsaw Mermaid without 10,000 people in the background. I could actually see the castle in Old Castle Square!

I’ve managed to miss something obvious. There’s a tram stop below Old Castle Square and it’s accessible by just taking the stairs down the side of the bridge holding the square up. So I got on a tram and started heading back to the Wschodnia, via a nice double-towered Gothic church I spotted along the way. This one is less of a touristy church than the ones in the city centre and so I tried to be really quiet and keep to the sides and the back – very difficult when your wet sandals are squealing at the top of their voices. It’s nice enough stained glass but not as breathtaking as some I’ve seen. There are portraits of people in the top of the windows and those are nicely done. I really need to do a stained glass session as soon as I can actually find one.

And then back to Wschodnia. I collected my luggage, had a minor meltdown over the lack of ticket machines, even though it says on the windows of the ticket desks “please buy tickets on the internet or use the ticket machines in the station hall” (which don’t exist!!) and then the lady sent me off to platform 6 and told me it was cheaper to buy a ticket from the machine on the train. Well, that machine looked very familiar. I found a seat, did a little research and discovered a) that regional S-trains are covered under my ZTN 72-hour ticket and that the airport, astonishly, is in zone 1.

So I made it to the station. I made it through security nice and early and thought I just had to sit and wait. I looked for most postcards and didn’t find any but I did find a Polish mug that surely must dwarf even a Sports Direct mug. How to get it home, I have no idea. I was given a bag literally the diameter of the mug and a piece of bubble wrap but the bag is far too small to put the mug in with the bubble wrap around it. First job when I find a seat is to try to sort that out.

Of course, I’d forgotten one small airport detail. I’m not done and just waiting for the plane. I have to go through passport control! And of course, because we’ve taken back control, I have to go through the all passports queue instead of popping through the electronic gates, wait for the nice border lady to figure out my recent travel history and stamp my passport while staring like angry Paddington the whole time. Her stamp needs more ink. She’s succesfully put it next to the London stamp but it’s so faint you can only just make out the PL in the corner and the date across it. That’ll be the last stamp for that passport, I guess.

Then I found a seat at my gate, wrestled with the mug and the bubble wrap and the bag, had a strop and finally produced the paper bag I got with my shopping in Berlin last week. I’d planned to use it as my shopping bag for the entire trip, but it’s turned out that I’ve shopped little and often because I’ve moved so much and my little yellow bag has mostly been enough for my daily shopping. The mug is now more or less wrapped in the bubble wrap and sitting in the paper bag next to its useless plastic bag and I’m just going to have to cling to it like a baby until I get it to the car. Now to sit here for another hour before boarding, get to Heathrow, maybe stop for food, get back to the car and drive home. Midnight, perhaps.