ON mid-winter days like this, Warsaw is covered by a thick blanket of grey cloud, yet it is bitterly cold, especially if there's an east wind blowing in from Siberia. But at night - and it gets dark early there - the city that suffered more than most sparkles with white Christmas lights, writes Frank McDonald.
In Dublin, only the shopping streets are decorated to make us more cheerful about spending money. But in Warsaw, the most dazzling displays are on the royal processional route once travelled by Poland's kings to their castle on the edge of Stare Miasto (literally the old town).
All along Nowy Swiat, which is lined with neo-classical town houses, lamp standards on each side of the street are extravagantly dressed in trailing white lights, supporting arcs of more trailing white lights over the carriageway. The effect is quite magical, like a winter wonderland.
On Krakowskie Przedmiescie, known as the Street of Palaces because it's closer to the castle, the style is somewhat different. There are no arcs of light; instead, there the lamp standards are girdled in bulbous frames of white lights while all of the trees twinkle, even their trunks.
Warsaw is a city that lives on memory, so Krakowskie has its share of statues - Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish romantic poet; Prince Jozef Poniatowski, one of Napoleon Bonaparte's generals; and Nicholas Copernicus, the great astronomer who defied errant church dogma.
And they're all still there, thanks to the heroic restoration of a historic city left in ruins after the failed Warsaw Uprising; what hadn't been damaged during the uprising was systematically destroyed by the Germans before they withdrew under fire from Stalin's Red Army.
The shocking story of the doomed uprising and its even more horrific aftermath is graphically and gut-wrenchingly told in the Warsaw Uprising Museum, on an otherwise anonymous street (Przyokopowa) in an area that's undergoing a second round of reconstruction.
Many historic buildings that survived the uprising were blown up by the Nazis. When General Eisenhower came to Warsaw soon after the war ended, he famously commented: "I have seen many towns destroyed, but nowhere have I been faced with such destruction." Among the most poignant sights is a series of pictures of what places along the royal route used to look like, mostly by Bernardo Bellotto, a nephew of Canaletto. They're mounted on translucent, layered glass plinths, set at an angle to the newly-paved and widened footpaths.
It's from sources such as these - as well as lithographs, engravings, photographs and drawings made over the years by generations of architecture students - that the old centre of Warsaw was rebuilt with single-minded determination, mostly during the Communist period.
Everybody knows about the remarkable reconstruction of the old town square. I have to confess that, before going to Warsaw for the first time on my way back from the UN climate change conference in Poznan, I thought this was pretty much all the Poles had done. But it's much more than that. The restored old town encompasses all of the surrounding streets, the churches and their spires, the medieval city walls and barbican from 1548, and the royal castle itself; its reconstruction from rubble on the site wasn't finished until 1984.
Four years earlier, the whole extraordinary effort was recognised by Unesco as "an outstanding example of a near-total reconstruction of a span of history covering the 13th to the 20th century", and the entire area of some 80 acres was designated as a World Heritage Site.
Personally, I abhor pastiche because it lacks authenticity. But in the case of old Warsaw, I'd make an exception. Although not much more than 50 years old, the baroque-style buildings are beginning to acquire the patina of age; only the sameness of their windows betrays them.
MUCH of the rest of Warsaw is a bit of a fright by comparison. Communist-era slab blocks of flats, 12 to 15 storeys high, flank terrifyingly wide boulevards that are in reality highways to carry increasing volumes of traffic. Cars are parked all over the place, footpaths being a favourite.
Now, the city is undergoing another reconstruction that is more radical in its way than what went before. High-rise hotels and corporate office blocks up to 40 storeys high have been popping up all over the centre, and so randomly that it's impossible to believe there is a plan.
Certainly, there is no sense that the skyline is being composed like a Chopin sonata. Previously, it was dominated by the Palace of Culture and Science, a Stalinesque Gothic gift from the Soviet Union, which the people of Warsaw detested from the moment it was finished in 1955. Though protected front and rear by public parks, it is being crowded out by the "new Manhattan-like shards of glass" - as one Irish resident described them - rising in the financial district to the west. Playing to a populist mood, this appears to be deliberate policy.
Some people in Warsaw would get rid of it altogether, just as they tore down a huge Russian Orthodox cathedral after Poland regained its independence after the first World War. But of course some Dubliners disgraced themselves by celebrating the destruction of Nelson's Pillar.
"Stalin's Wedding Cake" is showing signs of poor maintenance, but the façades of its central tower are brightened up after dark by dozens of twinkling stars. Meanwhile, the Christmas tree in the glitzy shopping centre nearby is an elaborate advertisement for Ferrero Rocher.
It's nothing like the magnificent "tree" in front of the old Royal Castle. A huge cone-like frame, about twice as high as the one in Dublin's O'Connell Street, it supports an ever-changing display of colourful lights that captivates Warsaw's children - and their parents - on these cold winter evenings.