Warsaw

Warsaw moves at a relentless pace — construction cranes compete with glass towers along Rondo ONZ while the metro runs shoulder-to-shoulder at rush hour and Nowy Świat fills by 6 PM without any prompting. The city is a physical argument about reconstruction: the Royal Castle and Stare Miasto are meticulous postwar copies, built from wartime photographs and Canaletto paintings, standing a few hundred metres from Soviet-era housing blocks and 21st-century steel-and-glass headquarters. That collision — between deliberate preservation and aggressive modernisation — gives Warsaw a friction that older, more settled capitals lack. A week here means navigating a city still deciding what it wants to be, which makes it more honest than most.