Warsaw

There is a particular sort of malaise that afflicts the surroundings of major railway stations, Warsaw perhaps more so than many; under the station is a warren of passages crammed with alternating newsagents, all-night kebab stands and malodorous cheap Internet cafes, outside the station is a gigantic Stalinist square surrounded by six-lane highways with the Palace of Science and Culture sitting gigantically and Stalinistically in the centre.

The Old Town, completely rebuilt between about 1965 and about 1980, is pretty if tourist-driven; the Museum of the History of Warsaw is really very good, though cutting off abruptly in 1990. I wonder why the stories of what Polish scouts did in the Uprising weren't at least as repeated as the tales of Mafeking when the Scouts were recruiting at school; I suppose, like everything in the Uprising, the happy ending was postponed forty-five years and an awful lot of the principal characters had died in Soviet custody or in London exile in the meantime. The Monument to the Uprising takes up about half a city-block, and was opened on August 1 1989, about the first moment it could have been.

There's also the Uprising Museum; it is surrounded by a long fence of about 130 sections, each section of which is made of five slabs, each slab has fourteen names of the fallen inscribed on it. It's a good museum, of the modern well-labelled maze variety; made me wonder (papersky almost certainly knows this) if there's a collection of Orwell's wartime writing for the Tribune available. They had an animation of the Allied and Soviet front lines over 1944-45, which reminded me how little history I know; I had no idea of the existence of the second Allied front in France up around Marseilles a few months after D-day, and only a dim one of how unstoppably the Soviet lines thundered West after Stalingrad. Nor was I anything like so clear how much of a bastard Stalin was.

Aside from that, there's ice-cream, a large amount of municipal green space (I supposed municipal green space was a cheap thing to provide in a city 85% of whose buildings were raised, though in fact the parks were there from the beginning) equipped with incredibly tame biscuit-stealing red squirrels, shiny skyscrapers next to unpainted brut-concrete apartment blocks, and a large artifical palm tree on Charles de Gaulle Roundabout.

Flights (or, possibly, trains)

I've an Easyjet flight booked Saturday afternoon from Krakow to Luton.

Easyjet flights out of England are quite comprehensively cancelled, which I imagine means by the Law of Conservation of Aircraft that everything except the absolutely-next flight from any destination into England is going to be problematic; I'm having visions of the entire Easyjet fleet lined up wing-tip to wing-tip at Luton, rather as I saw the entire Air Paradise fleet lined up in a line at Kuta after they went suddenly bust.

Which I think means either I wait in Poland until the problems are resolved -- and I'm reluctant to bet on how long it will take for the professional paranoids of Thames House to loosen up on their paranoia -- or attempt to head home over land.

A train from here takes 25 hours via Poznan, Cologne, Brussels and the Chunnel, which, whilst I've only a book and a half left, sounds a lot more fun than long waits at Krakow airport; on the other hand Eurostar tickets for immediate travel appear to cost 150 pounds, and the long overland stretch is probably about the same. A bus takes no longer and is 90 pounds, and maybe no more uncomfortable.

Or am I being silly, panicing in advance of the facts; should I simply wait and check on Saturday afternoon if my flight actually exists, and rely on my boss not to mind too much if geopolitics keep me from work until Tuesday.