In sharp contrast to my navigation struggles getting to the Palace of Culture, Google Maps nailed the location of the closest Metro station that would take me to East Warsaw and the Polish Vodka Museum. Unfortunately, God started to laugh as I walked in because the signs were only in Polish and I couldn’t discern which of the two staircases down would go in the right direction. Unlike the busses and trams, the Warsaw metro system is a complicated labrynth of stairwells that go to platforms where only certain trains stop. All I had to go on from Google is I could take Routes 1-7 and get to the museum with a short 10 minute walk, yet nothing in English told me where Routes 1-7 stopped once I was inside the Metro. I located a young person and was directed to completely exit the side I had entered, go down the opposite stairwell and then look for a slightly hidden stairwell to get to Platform 2, and then pretty much any train would be ok.
In theory, yes, I was now on the right platform but there is industrial knowledge needed on where to stand exactly on the platform to actually enter the train. If you stand too close to the end, the train may shoot by and you can’t get to the first door before it races off. If you stand in the middle with the bulk of passengers, you may not get on because by the time passengers exit and then the large group enters, you may miss the open door window and it doesn’t reopen. The key to the metro is to find a smaller pocket of passengers that you can join slightly off center. Three passed trains later, I was three stops away from East Warsaw.
The Warsaw I saw streaming by changed drastically from the cosmopolitan, clean West Warsaw where I was staying and by the time I got to the East Warsaw exit, I was glad it was only maybe 3 pm and not after dark. The Google maps screenshot showed me to simply go up a short flight of stairs and I would be at the Vodka museum in 10 minutes. Unfortunately for me, there were stairs in all four corners of the exit of the Metro. Even when I turned Google Maps on, it struggled to find my location and give me the little arrow and dots to get from here to there. One complete loop in the wrong direction later, I was back on track and had exactly 11 minutes to get to the Vodka museum before the tour started at 3:30pm, which was the only 70 minute tour I could still make before I had to head out for the Chopin Concert.
Total value realized on my Warsaw pass at this point was the 6 euro admission to the Viewing Terrace and getting to skip the line.