A night in WARSAW

Departing Rome Fiumicino i was ridiculously proud of myself for saving 60 euro by not checking my huge backpack (on loan from Jason Gran, quite useful I'm trying my damnedest to not make it smell by the end of the trip :/).  On the plane I was without a doubt the only non polpolska speaker there, so I tried to keep under the radar.  I was given a sandwich with a piece of white cheese, half a piece of lettuce and some unknown red sauce/spread.  It wasn't too bad, but then again I was really hungry.  Upon entering the Warsaw airport I wasted no time in exchanging some euros to zlotys. The exchange rate was 2.8 zloty to one dollar, which seemed fine from what I read on the internet.  Then this woman came up and looked at the line of us (four people) are exclaimed,

"What is this?  The exchange rate is dreadful!  You can find thousands of these all throughout the city!"  I thought she may have known someone in the line but did not, we all sortof looked at her blankly and she scoffed away.

I flagged down a cab, that was a mercedes incidently, I showed the cabbie, with the most sunken in cheeks I've ever seen, the address to the Oki Doki hostel, "Oki Doki?  Oki doki!"  His brief look at the address made me nervous.  Maybe I'd watched too many 20/20 specials or maybe the words of Father Rich were coming back to haunt me, "well... you could get kidnapped," but I was fucking terrified.  Every scenario ran through my head, I have no idea where he's taking me, I know its in the city center, no one knows where I am, I looked at his ID picture, it looked like it was from the 1940s, no identification number... shit...  I kept my backpack on, ready to leap out of the car at any moment, are these automatic locks, I tried them out, I think I was making him nervous, he motioned for me to take my back pack off, no thank you.  We made it to the hostel and the cab fare was reasonable... I'm just a little neurotic.

I'm shown to my room by a nice polish girl who has the same eye makeup on as me, hahaha.  I'm in the all pink room, 3 bed female dorm, meet a roomie, she's already going to bed, has to get out to Krakow tomorrow early, I take a look at the map, Old Town is fairly close, I decide to give it a go.

Surprise, surprise, though, 10 minutes walking by myself in the dark and I convince myself that someone's following me, by this point I think I'm actually the one freaking the locals out.  I'm changing my gait, then my path, hiding in doorways waiting for people to pass, looking generally pissed off.  I reach a square.  

Warsaw really is a rather ugly city.

Return to the hostel, go to the bar, just miss the happy hour special, but beer's very cheap here anyway.  I meet three Aussies, they've only been here a day.  I deal with the initial shit for being an American, "So how embarrassed are you about Bush?"  They make me say works with A's so they can hear my Chicago accent and eventually they convince me to go out with them.  We try to find a few places, I actually speak the most Polish out of all of us which is sad, ask a hooker for directions, which is not successful.... eventually we give in and go to the Hardrock Cafe, most expensive place in the area most likely, but  it's still far cooler than any of the Hardrock cafe's I've been to in America, maybe because i can drink in them now, I don't know.

This hardcore band is going on, not bad...  by this time I'm about 3 beers in, still fine... but honestly Polish beer must have about 1.5 amount of the alcohol content, go to another bar, then another... It starts to hit me, we're at a club type place, the local dance is pretty hilarious, lots of head bobbing it seems, go to a place with a cloak check, brilliant, and around 3:30am stumble back to the hostel.  I have to wake up in about 6 hours to catch my flight, I'm golden.