Warsaw travel diary: day 1

I had the absolute best time in Warsaw last week, and as my Belgium travel diary posts were so popular I thought I'd recreate the magic with my latest trip. We were there from Tuesday to Saturday, and managed to cram in some museums, a lot of vodka, and around 60,000 steps. So here's day 1 of my Warsaw travel diary - enjoy!

After a 4am alarm, a 4.45am taxi, a 5.24am train and a 15 minute walk to Terminal 3, we'd made it through security and onto the first excellent part of the holiday - getting to chill out at the 1903 Lounge, a luxury adults-only lounge (T1 and T3 at Manchester Airport) that allows you to escape the crowds and indulge in unlimited food and drink from £35pp. It's sooooo worth it, especially if you've got a budget flight anyway (we paid less than thirty quid each to get to Warsaw and back) - it's warm, quiet, and there's so many choices when it comes to food and drink. As we were there from about 7am, there was a fry-up buffet including tiny hash browns and butter croissants, teas and coffees, orange juice etc... and then the bar. Gins, vodkas, whiskeys, cider, beer, soft drinks, wine and more. You help yourself to everything and it's just such a nice way to sit back and relax before your flight with free WiFi and comfy seats. A huge thank you to the team at Manchester Airport for inviting me to check out the lounge, you really helped our holiday get off to a fab start! Head to the 1903 Lounge website to find out more.

After a brief issue at the gate (the hangar doors were broken, cue phone calls and alarms and engineers) we had a really smooth flight, and were in a taxi on the other side in a mere couple of hours. We were practically manhandled into the taxi by a guy called Josef who wasn't going to let us get our bearings before he whisked us off to the city, but it didn't really matter. I'd checked online beforehand and made sure to have the 159zloty in cash ready and waiting - that's how much the flat fare into the city centre is, but it varies if you're staying outside of the centre.

Josef acted as a bit of a tour guide as he drove us into the city, pointing out interesting places and telling us a bit of history, and he gave me his number to put into my phone to arrange a taxi back which was nice of him. Anyway, he dropped us off and we followed the instructions for getting into the Airbnb I'd booked, which looked complicated when written down but were actually really simple, and then we were in. And bloody hell. It was bright, spacious, warm, had everything we needed AND a boss view to match.

We unpacked and headed across the park to the strip of shops that was to our left, where I was greeted by a Flying Tiger store (the motherland) and various other shops such as TK Maxx, Reserved, Zara and more. I obviously went into Flying Tiger (haul coming soon) and then we popped into the supermarket to stock up on beer, pizza monster munch, juice, vodka, cereal, milk etc. We got everything we needed and wanted for about thirty quid, which is great when you think it included a bottle of vodka and a lot of crisps.

When we got back to the apartment we decided to head out for food; directly beneath us, on the ground level of our block of apartments, was a 24/7 Italian restaurant called Mamma Mia Never Closed. I won't go into too much detail as I'll be writing a 'where we ate in Warsaw' blog post soon, but it was amazing. I did a quick Google search for nearby bars, and one of the first to come up was Rock Friends which, typically, played rock music and had guitars on the wall and did quad vods for a fiver. Drunk and happy and cold we stumbled back across the park to our little apartment to get some sleep ahead of our first full day in Warsaw...

Keep your eyes peeled for day 2 coming soon!

Want to read about my first time travelling solo? CLICK HERE