Normal blogging resumes from today; there will be more localist photography and fewer spiritual and philosophical musings. For the time being anyway...
On 21 March, I had the chance to visit the Varso tower for the first time - the EU's tallest building, opened late last year. Below: Warsaw skyline looking west from Warszawa Śródmieście. Skyscrapers from the left: LIM tower, Central tower, Varso Place (centre), the Lumen building by Złote Tarasy, and Złota 44 ('Żagiel', or the Sail).
From the 43rd floor, the views, shortly after nightfall, were spectacular. Impressive city, Warsaw - what you are gazing down upon was nothing but rubble 78 years ago. Below: looking north, along ulica Towarowa/ul. Okopowa.
Below: looking north-east towards aleja Jana Pawła II.
Left: looking
down on the Palace of Culture, with Złote Tarasy in the foreground. A long-held dream of mine. My dream was to be able to do this from 360 degrees - Stalin's gift to the people of Warsaw ringed by supertall skyscrapers, each one higher than it, rendering it invisible when looking at the Warsaw skyline from a distance.
This might never happen - the shift to remote work, resulting from Covid and IT, means that corporates need less floor-space for their offices, and so the rush to build supertalls has slowed right down.
Below: once a familiar sight in railway stations and airports around the world, the flip-over destination indicator board has almost completely been replaced by LCDs. Warsaw's Śródmieście station still has some; they will not be around very long. Known across former communist Europe as the Pragotron (after the city of Prague, where the company that manufactured them, Elektročas, was based). Working off punch-cards, the mechanical complexity of these devices (and lack of spares) means their days are coming to an end. The flik-flik-flik-flik sound of the destinations flipping over as a train departs will soon be history. Make sure you take a conscious note of it before it goes.
Earlier in the month, I got out of Warsaw on two business trips.
Below: leaving Szczecin station at daybreak, having come up on the night train.
Below: the rising sun colours the distant waters of the River Oder. To the left, the tower of the Pomeranian Medical University.
Left: the same tower, this time in the late afternoon. Szczecin will never allow the visitor to forget its Germanic history - the architecture is so characteristic.
Below: the Urząd Morski (maritime office) building, the neo-gothic former Neues Rathaus (new town hall), opened in 1879. Burnt just after the second world war by Soviet soldiers, it was rebuilt in the 1960s, and renovated in 2008-15. The strong sunlight brings out the colour of the brickwork.
Below: Szczecin's main post office, built around the same time as the Rathaus, and in the same materials, but still serving its original purpose. Renovated in 1995.
On 9 March I had a meeting with the Wałbrzych Special Economic Zone at the Lower Silesian Science and Innovation Park. I travelled to Wrocław by night train, arriving shortly after 5am. A leisurely breakfast in the (mercifully!) open Scottish restaurant, where meat-free food was on the menu, and at 6am I set off on foot for to my destination - 8.2km from the railway station. It rained all the way. By the time I arrived, nearly two hours later, I was soaked through. Still, I did my paces for the day. Below: Much of the route was like this.
Passing the war memorial honouring soldiers of the Polish Army, 1939-45 (erected in 1979), I decided to walk to the top. Until I looked down upon the individual graves, I thought it was going to be a Soviet memorial - that communist aesthetic pervading, the sculpture looking to my contemporary eyes in the wet morning like nothing more than a pile of body-bags stacked high. Somehow it failed to arouse any meaningful emotion in me.
Below: looking down from the summit at the Park+Ride by the Oporów tram loop. The hill was a popular destination for joggers and Nordic walkers. Just 20 cars parked (it's around 7am).
The Wałbrzych SEZ event was very interesting, focused on HR, and attracting HR directors from across Lower Silesia. I returned to Warsaw by car, as one of two passengers (three or more people in a fossil-fuel-powered car = same carbon footprint as doing the same journey individually by train). My longest car journey of the year so far.
Back to Warsaw, the train to town takes a different route; all trains from the Radom line are diverted to Warszawa Gdańska via the mis-named W-wa Zachodnia Peron 9. Below: my train is about to cross over the brand-new bridge that carries traffic over onto the Warsaw bypass route (via W-wa Wola). The old route - the tracks leading into the centre of the photo - was far more convenient for me, but awaits modernisation.
Tomorrow's photo catch-up will be rural in character.
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