In which our hero changes planes and has four hours in Warsaw

I spent seven weeks travelling around the new world and wanted every moment to blog but failed to do so. Had I worked out how to dictate onto my telephone I might have left a wonderful record of my travels. I don't know. 

Here am I outside the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw where I changed planes on my way from Korsice to Bucharest. I chose to do this rather than travel by the scenic railway route to Budapest. I shall not reopen decisions. The moving finger wrote and all that 

The Hotel Warsaw is famous partly because it's the scene of quite a lot of the first chapter of one of the two books I read in the last 20 years that most live in my mind, Kapput by Malaparte, the other being War and Peace. 

In 1994 when I first visited the old town seemed a toy town of no interest really but by now it has aged well like Ypres which was rebuilt after the first world war by German labourers. 

But Warsaw smells of death: not just of the terrible horrors of which the Germans were guilty but also the terrible horrors of the communists and the Russians. 

At a moment like this when it's possible that we're about to see the beginning of another world war how sad one feels that Beck the Polish foreign minister did not accept the deal Hitler offerered Poland in late 1938. Are we equally blind now?

I have my multi-colored umbrella bought all those years ago secondhand because a nice man brought it to me in the airport and told me I left it in the plane. Only observe was Henry James's advice for writing but it applies to life.