A hot time in the Old Town

The procession marched along Aleje Ujazdowskie to Parliament. A line of riot police - young, nervous-looking men, armed to the eyeballs - blocked our path. Someone lobbed a tomato, but it overshot the police and exploded on the pavement in front of the grey Parliament building.

Feelings were running high, but we were quite peaceful demonstrators. A grey-haired man with a moustache stood up in the back of a truck and made what seemed to be a very good speech - stirring and passionate. Then another man stood up and made another speech - more light-hearted, with some excellent jokes. Two middle-aged women, both round and smiling, sang a song. We were united in our cause - whatever it was.

I knew we were country people, in town to complain about something (probably involving not enough zlotys) but only later did I find out it was changes to legislation on importing grain that we were upset about.

These countrysiders were craggy men with sad, dignified faces that looked as if they'd been hewn out of the Polish soil. A few women had turned up, some in traditional dress, but the demonstration was mostly male. And, with very few exceptions, they wore moustaches. The Walesa look isn't entirely dead in Poland.

The demonstration was a lot more entertaining than my tour of the Lazienki Palace, where the world's most boring guide had droned on so it was impossible to pay attention to a single word he said (I just about managed to take in that a king called Stanislaw had lived there).

When a fierce woman shouted at me for sitting on the 18th-century furniture, it was time to head for a cafe for tea with rum and an elaborate ice cream, slightly spoiled by Metallica from the cassette player. Nice park, though, with some impressive carp in the lake.

It's to the old centre of town that people go to do tourism, so I headed there. Actually, the old town isn't that old, having been flattened during the second World War, but they've put it back to how it was in the 17th century.

The heart of it is Old Town Square, surrounded by tall merchants' houses, all painted different colours. Old town squares usually involve pigeons, bad art, overpriced cafes and beggars, and Warsaw's is no exception. But it's very pretty. Good busking. A small girl played unaccompanied Bach on her cello and a couple of mischievous boys - one singing, one playing the accordion - did something folksy.

I went down to the river Vistula a big, brown Baltic-bound affair, more like a country river than a city river. I wanted to tell the old man who was catching tiny fish and putting them in a plastic bag about the massive carp in the Lazienki Park, but my Polish didn't stretch that far. The only thing I knew how to say was "What do we want? More zlotys. When do we want 'em? Now." But that didn't seem quite appropriate.

Stubbornly ignoring the fact it was the Sabbath, I headed off to the Jewish cemetery, a distance of about an inch on my map. The scale meant that one inch seemed to correspond to 17 miles, and I walked for hours along wide roads lined by grey concrete buildings with small windows.

As you go out from the centre, it gets progressively grimmer; it's like walking backwards in time. Even the cars change: from spanking new Fords and Volkswagens to Ladas and Trabants. And the roadside stalls go from selling amber jewellery and Nike T-shirts to shoes and mushrooms. Mushrooms are big in Poland.

When I got there (it was so far out I'd got back to about 1950), the cemetery was closed. Through a chink in the gate I could see hundreds of gothic follies and graves between trees. More than 250,000 people are buried here, among them Ludwig Amenhot, inventor of Esperanto.

I caught the bus back to town, which took about four minutes (I could have been lying about the scale of that map). Polish buses - articulated ones and low-slung yellow monsters - are good news. And they have excellent trams, though I never found one going anywhere I wanted to go.

An evening out in Warsaw inevitably involves industrial quantities of vodka, so I can't tell you much about how mine went. I know it started off with mushrooms and venison, but then things get hazy. At one point, it involved a club called Piekarnia, somewhere in suburbia (not as far as the Jewish cemetery, so I guess around 1960, though inside it was very much 1998).

Piekarnia has a fairly open music policy: salsa, techno, prog rock, jungle. . . the only record the DJ couldn't play was Saturday Night Fever, because someone had stolen it. It became clear why everyone on the dance floor was wearing sunglasses when he switched on the strobe, turning my life into a flashing vodka-ry swirl.

Then I was somewhere called Barbados, which the guidebook said was where Warsaw's young nouveau riche like to go. The guide book was right - it was all Gucci, George Michael and glamour. A far cry from the country folk with craggy faces with whom I'd marched on Parliament.