Travel blog

Dateline May 23, 2016, Warsaw

We reached Warsaw on an overnight train that turned out to be a private room with bunk beds, rolling worse than any ship. Our Airbnb host Ada met us at the station and led us up five flights to a lovely flat in the Old Town, a quarter the Germans leveled in 1944 and the Poles rebuilt brick by salvaged brick. We met the Warsaw Mermaid and the story of Solidarity, and stood at the edge of the old Jewish Ghetto, a place John had carried in his head since reading John Hersey's The Wall as a young man.