Work trip to Warsaw, Poland - 9th to 10th January 2008

It is never a good thing to find out that a city you are about to visit is twinned with Grozny, the pile of rubble that passes for the capital of Chechnya. As if that wasn't bad enough, Warsaw is also twinned with Coventry. But, about 3 and a half weeks after last getting on a plane (which is some kind of record), I headed off there for my first trip of the year.

Having been to Warsaw before (albeit a long time ago), I remembered it as the centre of all things business-like in Poland, but a very functional, not very pretty city. Krakow got all of the nice squares and buildings (or rather, avoided having them all destroyed by the Germans in World War II), and Warsaw got left with all the ugly buildings during the postwar rebuilding effort. But then, having been almost completely destroyed on a few occasions in the not too distant past, perhaps the fact that it exists at all is remarkable enough.

The journey over there was punctuated by the usual Heathrow hassle, although the security queue was very suspiciously short. The flight featured a 2 year old boy who cried throughout the entire flight, usually very loudly, and seemed to be in a load of discomfort. When we parked up in Warsaw, we were not allowed off the plane, and the Polish authorities sent doctors on to see what was wrong with the kid - and whether he was contagious, and could have infected the rest of us. I would much rather that they'd done this before he got on the plane, and I spent 2 hours in a confined space with him!!

In what may well be a hangover from the old days in Poland, we were bussed to the terminal, a journey of 30 seconds at most, and one which could have been walked in a fraction of the time, since the plane parked no more than 10 yards from the building. It seemed like something that was done solely to keep some bus drivers in employment, especially as there were dozens of pristine and unused airbridges all along the terminal. The passport control room seemed equally bureaucratic, and the whole room was an unsettling orange colour, which made the whole airport look like a subsidiary of EasyJet.

My colleagues in Poland were fantastic, and really went out of their way to look after me, which was great, especially given that the language is fairly daunting. Unsurprisingly, many Polish people I met were interested in the fact I was from the UK, and many reported having friends and relatives there. The huge migration of Poles to the UK is really felt in Poland as well, in the form of acute people shortages to do many jobs.

I did get some time to wander around in the city centre - which is a curious mix of "old" communist era buildings, and gleaming new capitalist skyscrapers. These are often right alongside each other, as in the photo here, which often looks weird. There seem to be quite a few skyscrapers in the city too, half of them old and drab, and the other half new and gleaming. Because the city was largely rebuilt after World War II, it is very efficiently laid out, with lots of wide boulevards, with yellow and red trams running down the middle.

This was a short but a good trip - the way home was again coloured by more Heathrow hassle. It really irritates me sometimes that the first a foreign visitor sees of the UK is a disfunctional disgrace like Heathrow Airport - a really bad welcome (back) to the UK, and an awful advert for the country. What a shame.