Bicycle shops in Warsaw open at 11:00 am. The first bicycle shop sat 2 km away. I’d decided to walk to the first one, and then use e-scooters to check out the others. At about the 1 km mark I passed a bicycle shop that hadn’t responded to my email. Deciding I’d rather drag a bicycle box 1 km than 2 km, I waited until it opened. The mechanic didn’t speak English so I used Google Translate to convey what I was looking for. He gave me the seemingly universal “wait one moment” hand gesture, and walked away. Some crashing upstairs later and he came down dragging a bicycle box.
I usually use a box larger than the one he provided; I wasn’t sure whether the box would be big enough, but a box in the hand is worth two in a bicycle store. I walked back to the hostel and packed the bicycle in the box. Barely. I don’t usually have to remove the fender. Nonetheless, primary objective achieved.
From there I wandered the city for a while before tracking down the required store with tape. I returned to the hostel to finish packing the bicycle in the box with all of my gear.
Along the day I spent a long time talking to one of my hostel mates, a experienced traveler from Chile who is working on closing out visiting every country on the planet. He said one advantage of being a traveler from Chile is that many places have never heard of Chile before, so he avoids a lot of political discontent for some other countries. But he’s also struggling with a sensation I have had as well (at a much smaller scale!) that everything just starts to run together.
Over lunch I spent a while talking to a woman from Australia, who doesn’t head home until November.
Warsaw bustles with tourists. One surprising thing is the high police presence; there are a couple of police officers on almost every corner and I can usually see a police car somewhere nearby.
Despite how generally flat Warsaw is, there’s only a small number of cyclists. Bicycle lanes are a little inconsistent in the city, but overall the bicycle infrastructure looks good.