In Warsaw

No city is so boring that it cannot amuse for two days. No airport is so amazing that it does not begin to pall after two hours.

My wife and I have been stuck in Warsaw for 48 additional hours and counting. We're now a long way past both the two-day and two-hour marks.  It's the shortest day of the year and it's back out to Frederic Chopin airport to sit at a gate or perhaps even on the plane itself hoping that Heathrow deigns to allow us entry.  Time will doubtless crawl; not a great way to spend the longest night of the year.  And across the world passengers just like us will be doing exactly the same thing.  No longer in Miami or Barcelona or Oslo we're reduced to generic tubes of people, 100% interchangeable in the eyes of air traffic control.

Last night we sat around the airport bar with a crowd of twentysomething fellow passengers waiting for the flight to finally cancel and cooking up crazy schemes to hire a minibus and drive round the clock for Calais.  Aren't all the best long-distance driving plans are made whilst drinking heavily with perfect strangers?  We snuck out through immigration and back to our hotel.

Just down the street from where we slept is a nondescript plaque, one of hundreds around the city. It commemorates the fact that nine Poles were summarily executed on that spot by 'Hitlerite' troops on August 1, 1944.

Horrible as this memorial is I find something optimistic and forward looking about the fact that the troops are identified historically as 'Hitlerite' rather than racially as German.  And I love the fact that Poland's national airport is named not for a monarch or a president or a general or an explorer but rather for an artist.