More old-school retailing

Step away from the Auchans, Reals, Carrefours and Tescos to get a glimpse of an idealised Poland in the 1980s, one where the State ran the shops and yet they were somehow full. So here we are in the Społem on Marszałkowska, next door to Warsaw's first-ever McDonalds. Twenty years on, and - despite the contemporary brands filling the shelves - a certain quaint old-school aura permeates this retail establishment. Click to enlarge the photo.

Look at the signage; POULTRY, SMOKE MEAT, SWEETS, PRESERVES, GOOD BECAUSE IT'S POLISH, HOUSEHOLD CHEMICALS, CHEESES. Staff and clientele are largely middle-aged or old (and this is the very centre of Warsaw). No tourists stray in here - a shame, as its an educational experience.

This is a supermarket within a department store on three levels, although there are some contemporary tenants around, it still has that PRL flavour about it. There's a fresh-squeezed juice stand (a plastic cup of carrot juice 3 złotys, beetroot juice 2.80 złotys). Worth a visit, though you need to imagine only one-tenth of what's currently on display being available on the shelves, circa 1989. Some more old-school retailing in Warsaw here and here.

This time last year:
Easter Sunday - Lent's over

This time two years ago:
Węzeł Lotnisko - site cleared, ready to start construction

This time three years ago:
Classic Polish cars - the Polski Fiat 125P

Spring explodes upon Jeziorki

A beautiful weekend; hard to believe that just a week ago I looked out of the same window to see snow. Today's temperature reached +18C in the shade; in the sunshine it was T-shirt weather.

Left: from my bedroom window I espy a hare dashing across the field. At first, I thought it was a dog; hares are quite sizeable; the gait, however, is unmistakable.

The sun now rises around ten past six - what with the clocks going forward last Sunday, there's now plenty of light. And now comes the feeling of warmth on the skin; the smells of spring in the air; the sounds of wildlife.

A Trombitious kind of day; no point of wandering further afield when there's so much going on in my immediate vicinity.

Above: the southern end of the wetlands between ul. Trombity and Dumki. I'm in wellingtons and the water around me is teeming with frogs and frog spawn. It's the mating season, and the frogs are croaking loudly, and enjoying the sun's warming rays. Some are browny-green, others are pale blue. Toads and frogs? Male/female frogs in mating colours? Anyone know?


Bird life is also abundant. I spotted a heron in flight, many black-faced gulls, a pair of marsh harriers, a trio of mallards circling the reedbeds; this bird (right) caught my attention with its song. Even with the aid of a 400mm lens, it took me a while to actually see who was singing. This is (I am informed) a blue-tit, sitting on a willow tree, feeding on catkins. Every now and then, he'd pull one off and it would fall lazily to earth. When not feasting, he'd be singing his little heart out, with a shrill, clear, voice loud and clear.

This time two years ago:
Along the way for Warsaw's southern bypass

This time three years ago:
Quintessential Warsaw vista

This time four years ago:
Jeziorki on Google Earth

Halfway through Lent

It is exactly halfway between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. Time to take stock. In terms of dietary restrictions - nearly 100% success. I drank two teas that turned out to be fruit-flavoured black tea rather than caffeine, and twice the spinach I ordered contained cheese or cream. Other than that - resolution has stayed firm. Exercise continues - I've not skipped a single session morning or evening. So I'm now doing 30 press-ups at a go, and this morning I managed 100 sit-ups.

Cycling to work has resumed; 17km each way - it won't be every day of the week, but certainly as often as practical. The result of diet and exercise is a clear reduction in waistline; 13mm /just over half an inch. Going back to my first blogged Lent (2008), I've reduced my waistline by two and half inches (from 39 and a quarter to 36 and three-quarters), and as a result I'm 5kg (12lbs) lighter.

All good from the point of cardio-vascular health.

Food-wise, as well as mountains of fish, fresh fruit and vegetables, there's been Brazil nuts dipped in honey, Polsoja's excellent soya pates and marinated tofu and of course Marmite on toast or crispbread.

This time two years ago:
Swans on ul. Trombity

This time three years ago:
Papal anniversary, Warsaw

This time four years ago:
Sowing oats, Jeziorki

Stalin's plans to escalate Armegeddon

Deep, deep under Warsaw, not far from Kolumna Zygmunta, stands a chilling monument to the Cold War. It was here that Stalin had built his nuclear command bunker from which he intended to launch atomic missiles against Western Europe. Opened to the public last month, the Soviet rocket launching panel (below) attracts interest from tourists and locals alike.

Because Russia was too far for the early Soviet rockets (based on wartime German V-2 flying bombs), the launch centre had to be situated further west, yet out of range of NATO's own rocketry. The historic heart of Warsaw was chosen as the last place that western spies would guess the installation could be located.

After Stalin's death and subsequent thaw in East-West relations, the nuclear installation was successfully used to power all of Warsaw's neon lights until the reactor finally broke down in 1965.

Left: One of the exhibits at the visitor centre, a Soviet map showing radioactive fallout crossing England, 36 hours after a putative 14 megaton nuclear strike on Manchester. Click to enlarge. Poster based on an illustration originally published in Atomnaya Energiya v Raky'etnoi Ty'ekhnikye, Moscow, 1951.

Note the quaint old British county names transliterated into Cyrillic. Chilling indeed.

This time last year:
Warsaw's favourite weekend destination

This time two years ago:
We are two

This time three years ago:

Crushed velvet dusk in my City of Dreams

This time four years ago:

My VERY FIRST blog post

Cycling to work - the season starts

The clocks went forward on Sunday; yesterday I decided to set off for work on my bicycle. This morning too. My route takes across me ul. Puławska, which at half past seven is totally blocked and stationary, as are the roads running into it.

To escape the madness, I cut down ul. Jagielska (below), bunged up solid for as far as the eye can see and then some more. Within seconds I shall enter the Las Kabacki forest to revel in solitude, birdsong and an escape from fossil-fuel burning short-distance one-per-car commuters.

Unfortunately, what I thought would be a pleasant ride turned out to be quite the opposite. The forest is podtopiony. (English lacks this word, having only 'flooded', but 'flood' = powódź). My cycling boots are soaked through, once again I'm forced to go to work in wet socks.

But once out of the forest, it's cycle path all the way to work. The weather is still tricky. I'm wearing four layers; my upper body is too warm, my toes are frozen and my hands (in skiing gloves) are too cold. On the way home, three layers are fine, but my hands are overheating.

Below: This is how a civilised city should commute. Proper cycle paths, signage and people using the facilities.

Below: evening commute along Al. Ujazdowskie. Note the contrast between the freedom of the cycle path and the stationary cars. More cycle paths for Warsaw! Paid for by a swingeing London-style congestion charge!

This morning I appeared in a recorded interview on Polish Radio 3 (Trójka), talking about UK-Polish trade. On the same programme with me was a financial analyst talking about the Portuguese and Greek sovereign debt crises, and a junior Pani Minister from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs talking about a new website concerning Poland's upcoming presidency of the EU Council. She was accompanied by an assistant who carried her briefcase.

After the recording, I left the studio by bicycle, the financial analyst by taxi... Pani Minister and her assistant sped away in a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes-Benz. (Three people to do a 15 minute radio programme.) And one wonders why Poland's public sector deficit is growing dangerously large... There seems a dangerous disconnect between the public administration and the real economy. Our chief executive officer has given up his car and taxis and now travels to meetings by public transport. For Martin, it's a matter of pride that he knows where the 171 bus goes and that the Metro is the fastest way from Kabaty into town.

Why do civil servants not get the belt-tightening and low-carbon transport message?

This time two years ago:

Five weeks into Lent

What happened at the Graffiti Wall

Returning home on Thursday evening, I saw the entire length of the Graffiti Wall along ul. Puławska by the Służewiec racetrack had been cordonned off with crowd control barriers. Security personnel stood at either end and along the whole kilometer length of the wall. "Funny," I thought... "I can't recall any rock act of global renown playing at Wyścigi..."

Mentioning this to Moni, who's au fait with what's occurring, I learned that sportswear firm Adidas had paid the racetrack's owner, the state totalisator, to paint over the entire wall, covering graffiti and street art alike with one huge advert.

What happened next is an case study in how to get vast amounts of bad PR - and an object lesson in how to mitigate the disasterous effects of getting it so badly wrong. As soon as word got out what Adidas was intending to do, a Facebook page was set up, on which thousands of practitioners and fans of street art mounted a massive protest. By Saturday, Adidas had thrown in the towel. The damage to the company's reputation among its target group (young, urban, trendy) had been done. About half the wall's length had been painted over in black, ready for advertising that never came. Instead came the recriminations.

Above: Could the ad agency not have predicted this reaction (replete with spelling mistake and mispunctuation)? Further on down the wall, anarchists used the event to critique capitalism. Now, even if Adidas had gone ahead with the huge ad, it would have been defaced to the point of illegibility within one night. Entirely counterproductive, a complete lack of understanding of the street art subculture.

Above: Do you remember how? I trust the previous murals had all been photographed by their creators and are in some digital archive somewhere, accessible at a mouse's click... The upside of the Adidas fiasco is that at a stroke, it created half a kilometer of fresh surface to be covered. And immediately, some striking new images arise, such as the one below.

Below: Meanwhile far away in another part of town, some football hooligans' graffiti - well, no, street art. Graffiti would be a foul oath followed by the name of some football club that it's unfashionable to follow in some small village.

This time last year:

First long bike ride of the season

This time two years ago:

Life returns to Jeziorki

This time three years ago:

Swans fly in

The iconic taste of Marmite

What to put on my toast and matzos when it's Lent and I'm off meat and dairy products? The answer is of course Marmite, something that's so quintessentially English. Unfortunately, it doesn't travel (culturally) and has failed to find mass-market demand for it here.

No longer can you find Marmite on the World Foods section in Tesco. I bought this 125g jar at Kuchnie Świata last week for a whopping 16 zlotys (£3.50); in the UK it retails for around £1.25. Kuchnie Świata is not cheap, but a mark-up of this size on this product suggests ultra-low sales in Poland. As the advert for Marmite used to go, "you either love it or you hate it". I've yet to meet a Pole who likes Marmite. And yet, as a (biological) Pole, I love Marmite. Maybe because I grew up with it, enjoying it as a child, spread on toast. Or drinking it as a hot beverage, a spoonful dissolved in boiling water. That childhood pleasure of the salty, tangy taste remains.

Interesting to read the Polish labelling for the product. Apparently, it's good with porridge!

Marmite is made from the sludge left over from brewing beer, I remember from a brewery visit to Burton-on-Trent. If you've never tried Marmite - give it a go. You'll not be indifferent to it!

This time last year:

My road bike, back in action

This time two years ago:

Spiritual highlight of Lent

Winter's slight return II

The surprise hit me not when I opened my curtains this morning but rather yesterday morning when I checked the 48-hour weather forecast on new.meteo.pl (the UM model). It suggested that snow would fall overnight. Which indeed it did. Last night, when I was picking Moni up from the Metro station around 11pm, the car thermometer read +7C. Then just after midnight, in the space of just 20 minutes, the temperature plunged by four degrees. And soon after it started snowing.

So new.meteo.pl gets it right again. I can recommend this service as being very accurate, although the 84-hour COAMPS model forecast also found on new.meteo.pl is not so good.

The overnight snow is rapidly disappearing from the lawn as I write these words and I'd be reasonably sure that this is the last snow of this winter. So time to take the camera and set off for a walk around the snow-covered fields for what could be the last time for eight or nine months.

Above: the pond on the corner of ul. Katarynki and ul. Pozytywki (barrel-organ and music box streets respectively). According to Google Maps, this small piece of water is called 'Jezioro Wąsal'.

Above: snow covers mud on the fields between ul. Żmijewska and ul. Karczunkowska. No ice on the water in the drainage ditch.

Above: looking towards ul. Karczunkowska, in the distance the blue roofs of our neighbours' houses across the way on ul. Trombity.

This time last year:
Pre-war trains faster than today's?

This time two years ago:
Winter in spring: last of the snow?

This time three years ago:

This MUST be the last of the snow!?