After breakfast Vassily led us on a walk across a bridge to the Old Town. Last night the taxi ride from the bus station had seemed incredibly long. This morning we find out that despite that, we are within walking distance of the city centre. The river is pretty wide, with a big sandbar on one side. The buildings of the New Old Town are clear to see, and soon we are on the other side of the river, or the backside of the river, as Vassily calls it, riding up a long escalator to a square with a statue in the middle of it. We hang around for a while and say a strangely emotional farewell to Vassily, whose work here is done. The group is to do a tour of the Old Town with one of the yellow umbrella guides, flying a Union Jack on the top of the umbrella to indicate an English language tour.

We spent some time at an ATM getting a small amount of zlotis, although everywhere accepts contact free and therefore currency free card payments. But in cafes and for tips it is useful to have some cash. Then into a Cafe Nero for an americano. Ju went off at ten thirty for the walk, but I wasn°t keen, so I decided simply to stay put and peoplewatch instead.

A bench nearby was dedicated to the music of Chopin, who was born in Warsaw, so I got used to hearing the minute waltz every few minutes when somebody pressed the button on the bench to hear it. Ju told me later there are fifteen of these around the city, to commemorate this great composer.

This didn°t stop an old man across the square with a boom box and a set of Andean pipes from cranking out everything from Yesterday to Ave Maria in competition. Endless crocodiles of small children in twos with hi vis vests and adults in charge, some rowdy teenagers, endless streams of tourists collecting around guides. The story of the Old Town is that it was flattened in WW2, but in the seventies the city authorities decided to rebuild it, not as it had looked in 1940 but as it had looked in the seventeenth century, helped by paintings, etchings, drawings from the archives. Principal among these were the paintings of Canaletto, apparently. So that is why it is the Old New Town.

Ju reappeared at half twelve, and we headed for the Jewish Museum, where we first of all had a light lunch of bagel and salad, then looked at the exhibition of life in Poland through the spectrum of the history of the Jews in Poland. We looked at the early part of this, realising that the Jewish diaspora reached this part of Europe really early on, through the development of trade and economic migration. We found the museum interesting, with as usual too much information to absorb easily, and like almost every museum I have visited in recent years, very poorly lit. At times I felt like reaching for my head torch so I could actually see the panels of information.

We reached saturation point after an hour or so and left, heading downtown by trolleybus to the Chopin museum. It was set in a beautiful building, and had an amazing amount of information about the composer°s childhood and early life, and really imaginative interactive samples of his work. For example there was a piano with a music stand which, if you placed one of three pieces of music on it, would actually play the piece, while a screen behind it film of a pianist°s hands played the piece too.

We were trying this out when all hell let loose, in the shape of a loud gaggle of schoolchildren, about 9 or 10 in age, and about thirty in number. They all piled in to the section and occupied all the interactive booths, and suddenly we couldn°t hear our magic piano any more!

We left the museum shortly after this, and headed back to the hotel via a couple of trolleybus routes. Rest and recreation in the hotel for an hour or two, then off by Metro to the restaurant for dinner. Our new guide Michal is Polish, very tall, very outgoing, The meal was good, Ju and I had wild boar! The composition of the group had changed too, we had lost some people and gained some more. A family of four from Canada, and two American women joined us for dinner, so we started to break the ice and get to know each other a little over the meal.

Back at the hotel six of us decided to go for a nightcap to a nearby bar Michal showed us, and that was very pleasant.

Early start in the morning, muster at 7.55 to travel to Krakow.......