Pozytywki pond - deeper, wider, longer

Driving back from the weekly shop at Auchan last Saturday, I noticed work in progress on the pond on ul. Pozytywki, with workmen pumping water out of it. I was without my camera at the time, so a big thanks to near-neighbour Marcin Daniecki for sending me a batch of pics from the works. Marcin also linked me to the official public tender website, which shows that the work to improve the functioning of drainage around this part of southern Jeziorki will happen in lightning tempo. The work here and on nearby Wąsal pond on ul. Katarynki is happening in parallel with the larger-scale re-cultivation of the wetlands between ul. Trombity, Dumki and Kórnicka that I've been covering in past weeks, and is intended to prevent a repeat of the disastrous flooding that we experienced in June 2010.

Above: eight-wheeler dump trucks await the soil, dug out from the bottom of the drained pond. Much of this soil will go to local fields, to raise their level as well as their quality - the mud from the pond is high-quality stuff! Most of the fields around Jeziorki right now can be seen sporting mounds of pond mud, which is being levelled by bulldozers.

Above: tree felling is under way. The area is losing some of its charm. The terms of the public tender are ambiguous: on the one hand, trees and bushes are to be cut down (wycinka drzew i krzewów), on the other hand, as well as serving as retention ponds, they must also serve the landscape and nature, maintaining the diversity of flora and fauna.

Below: according to the terms of the tender, the work has to be completed by 10 December. So Sunday working has been the norm. Today, I observed men with brooms sweeping mud and dust off the road surface on Pozytywki, Karczunkowska and Cymbalistów.

Left: what will remain, once the diggers and cutters have gone? What will be achieved - the security of local homes and fields from future flooding.

The ducks and herons will, I hope, return; a deepened, widened pond should mean more fish. And no doubt before too very long, the bushes and trees will grow back.

All the photos above are by Marcin Daniecki, many thanks once again for sending them to me, Marcin!

Below: the way it was, back in May this year. A lovely place, when the midges are not too troublesome. Balancing the needs of suburban man and nature will always be tricky.

Below: also from May 2012, the view looking west across the pond, from the old sluice gate.

Dreamliner over Jeziorki

At long last! I see it with my own eyes, after the years of waiting and delay - here she is! The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, in Linie Lotnicze LOT livery, over my house! SP-LRA, the first of LOT's fleet of eight aircraft ordered from Boeing. In fact, this is the very first Dreamliner to be delivered to a European airline.

I could make it out from a great distance - even well beyond Piaseczno, its long, flexy wings, bent upward at the tips like a slender banana, are unmistakeable. Far enough for me to grab my camera, change lenses to the mighty Nikkor 80-400mm (equivalent to 600mm on a DX-format sensor) and pop out onto the balcony. It sure makes and impression - it is big, it is quiet - and yet... and yet - those windows. The passenger windows are much larger than on any other airliner, giving the visual impression that the plane is therefore smaller than it really is. But I can assure you, the 787-8 Dreamliner is big; its 2m longer and with a 13m longer wingspan than the 767-300s that it will replace in LOT service. The Boeing 767 has been in commercial service for 30 years; LOT's fleet dates back to the early 1990s.

Below: LOT's 767-300, SP-LPA over Jeziorki, January 2009. And on the subject of LOT's 767 fleet, click here to see the most widely viewed post on my blog of all time ever (Captain Tadeusz Wrona bringing the disabled SP-LPE down over Jeziorki en route to a safe wheels-up landing at Okęcie).

This morning, I watched the Dreamliner flying south over Auchan, Piaseczno. A lovely sight, and so quiet too. By March of next year there will be more Dreamliners in LOT's fleet, serving the long-distance routes. For now, SP-LRA is flying training and promotional flights to regional airports.

I wish the new fleet well. LOT has had no fatalities during its post-communist history - may it continue to fly safely, may the Dreamliners serve as well as their predecessors. And may we one day fly one across the Atlantic to visit the New World.

Normal blogging is back (I hope)

Apologies for lack of posts, but Orangutan (as I mockingly called Orange, our telecoms 'provider') has just restored ul. Trombity's links to the outside world. No fixed telephone nor internet since Thursday night. In October, we were sold a Livebox ('10MB internet, WiFi around the house, free phone calls to anywhere in the EU, 290 channels of TV* etc etc, all for a fixed 113 złotys a month') package, but what the salesman failed to mention was that the old analogue phone line would be cut off for good and replaced with VoIP (voice over internet protocol), which is of a lower audio quality and of questionable reliability.

The Livebox internet has its pluses (we can use WiFi devices such as Eddie's iPhone or my laptop with it) and its minuses (it often quits working for minutes at a time, or longer). The wireless phone handsets we have won't work with the Livebox, the phone is therefore anchored to the desktop computer. All in all, a less satisfactory solution than the rosy picture I was sold by the salesman over the phone.

Orangutan has called several times with 'customer satisfaction surveys'; my overall response is - you are rubbish. I don't mind paying a lot of money for Rolls-Royce service. I don't mind paying peanuts for crap service. But I do mind paying double the money that a typical UK triple-play package costs and getting half the download speed coupled with dismal reliability. [More on the subject here.]

The problem with Poland's telecoms is that when the Polish state treasury 'privatised' Telekomunikacja Polska S.A., they sold it to France's public-sector telecoms operator, France Telecom, which has renamed itself to sound more friendly, to Orange. Now Orange was originally a British brand (once wholly owned by British Aerospace Systems), through many hands (from Hong Kong, Germany) it has made its way to France, where the word also means a fruit and a colour. In Polish, it is neither (pomarańcz, the fruit, pomarańczowy, adj. the colour.) Should Orange (the name of the telecoms company) be pronounced by Poles in the original English style (oryndż) or in the French of the brand's current owners (oranź)?

Many of the firm's Polish-speaking call-centre operatives simply refer to it as 'o-RAN-geh' (and why ever not?) - from which it is not too big a linguistic leap to 'Orangutan', and I'll let my readers make the necessary semiotic connection.

* Of zero interest to us - the TV decoder is sitting in its unopened box under the stairs.

This time last year:
The meaning of Clarkson 
(or - the fuss that kicks off when a British media pundit recommends shooting government officials)

This time two years ago:
Today, not so good.

This time three years ago:
In which I walk to work

This time five years ago:
Act 1, Scene 1, a blasted heath

Another November without snow

Over my 15 years in Poland, some snowfall usually occurs in November - usually late in the month, and usually the snow's only light. Still this year, just as last year, not a flake fell. Yes, there was some snow still remaining in the ground from the anomalous snow that fell on 27-28 October.

Looking back over old posts, one can see that a snow-free November is not that unusual. The outliers are snowy Octobers and snow-free Decembers. Having said that, snow's on the way, so no worries. Climate change, if measured by meteorological anomalies, is coming upon Poland at a slower rate than that facing the UK, which is probably why Brits are more concerned at reducing carbon than Poles.

In the meanwhile, here in Jeziorki, six million zlotys are currently being spent on improving water retention and drainage to stave off the effects of heavy snowfalls and torrential rain on the houses and fields of the neighbourhood.

This time two years ago:
Krakowskie Przedmieście in the snow

This time three years ago:
Ul. Poloneza bisected by S2 roadworks

Street Cries of Old Poland

"Piwo! Piwo jasne! Piwo!" The magical words put me in mind of the start of long-distance train journeys in bygone Poland, uttered by a man hurrying along the corridors hawking beer to the thirsty traveller. In the old communist days, beer was almost non-existent and the guy who'd scored some bottles or cans could fetch a tidy mark-up by selling it to the captive audience on a train.

Later, in the aftermath of transformation, beer was available but banned on Polish state railways (the non-alcoholic variety being on offer in the Wars restaurant carriages). So the beer hawkers continued their trade.

These days, Wars restaurants sell beer (I like the Starodawne from Konstancin brewery), and most large railway stations will in any case have a Carrefour or generic Alkohol 24h window within walking distance.

And yet the cry of "Piwo! Piwo jasne! Piwo" is still to be heard to this very day, though not as frequently as in the late-80s and early-90s, when every train journey would begin this way. Yesterday in Warsaw, the guy was still selling as the train pulled out of Centralna; he'd jump off at Zachodnia, board an east-bound train to Wschodnia and do it again, safe in the knowledge that tickets on long-distance routes are not checked until the trains have cleared Warsaw's outermost suburbs.

A typical price  for a beer is 5zł - unchanged in years. The beer hawker buys, say, 20 500ml cans at 1.89zł each, lugs 10kg around in a shoulder bag, making 3.11zł on each transaction. I didn't see him making any sales yesterday - it is late November, after all, so this is a hard way to make a living. He runs through the corridor, not making any attempt to hard-sell to any vacillating punter. If you hear his cries, you have seconds to make your mind up and stop him.

I was surprised to see this still happening, this relic of the late '80s. It would be more in keeping with the times if he were to say "Wino! wino czerwone  lub białe gronowe! Wino wytrawne, chilijskie, kalifornijskie! australijskie! Cabernet Shiraz! Merlot! Sauvignon Blanc!" and flog Lidl's excellent 250ml mini-bottles (retail 4.99zł) for ten zlotys. A larger mark-up, less carrying - he could concentrate on client service than on low-margin low-volume business.

Suffice to say, if you were to buy a beer from one of these chaps, there'd be no chance of a paragon fiskalny let alone a faktura VAT!

This time last year:
The gorgeousness of Warsaw at dusk

This time two years ago:
I'm so glad I'm living in Warsaw

This time three years ago:
Candid photography

This time four years ago:
Archival photos of the Rampa in action

This time five years ago:
Red sky in the morning...

Red tape and travel

To Kraków, to speak at yet another conference about PPP. I'm being paid by the organiser, by way of EU funds, so to reclaim my travel costs there and back, I need to present not just a ticket, but a VAT receipt (faktura VAT). Now, when queuing for a railway ticket, there's nothing more annoying when you're in a hurry to catch your train, to find the guy in front of you asking for a faktura VAT to go with his ticket. You know it will take an age.

So thinking of my fellow travellers behind me in the queue, I chose to buy my tickets from the main booking hall at Dworzeć Centralny (a.k.a. W-wa Centralna, or, as the English voice-over man on Warsaw buses and trams helpfully says, 'Shentroo wailway shtayshen'). Here, rather than a single queue as there are to the ticket windows in the underground passages beneath Centralna, there are two queues each serving six windows. The system is efficient and quick. The 16-person ahead queue of me evaporates in just eight minutes, with five of the six windows open.

It's my turn; I step forward. A sign at the window asks me to a) inform the ticket clerk if I wish to pay by credit card and b) inform the ticket clerk that I require a faktura VAT before ordering my ticket. Nice and clear. So now I make my request. "Ticket to Kraków Główny, InterCity, second class, departing Warsaw today at 16:30; return from Kraków to Warsaw, TLK, tomorrow at 20:04." And, of course, my faktura VAT. I cast an anxious eye around me, but the other four windows are functioning fine, no one can accuse me of being a zawalidroga (lit. road-blocker).

The lady behind the window is quick and efficient. Using an eraser-tipped pencil, she taps in the details of the conference organiser (company name, address, tax number) onto her computer screen.

And now, the fun starts. I have ordered four pieces of paper – my ticket there, a seat reservation, my return ticket and another seat reservation. Each one of these four pieces of paper requires THREE copies of the faktura VAT. One for my purposes (which I'll pass on to the conference organiser), one for the railway, and one for the tax-man. So that's 16 pieces of paper to print – from an ink-jet printer.

In my mind's ear, I can still here its eternal 'drrrrrrrrrrrr-drrrrrrr-drrrrrrr-drrrrrrrr-drrrr-drrrrr' as twelve individual faktury VAT are being printed. The ticket lady piles up the papers – these for me, these for her, these for the tax-man. Finally, she hands my tickets and faktury VAT, files away the others – I look at the clock – a nine whole minutes have elapsed since I stepped up to the window. Nine minutes of her time, nine minutes of my time. Is there no better way?

I look over the paperwork in my hand. Of the eight bits of paper I get (two tickets, two reservations, four faktury VAT), one is for the reservation of my seat for the TLK train back to Warsaw. It is to document 37 groszes' worth of taxation (seven pence), for a service for which I'm charged five zlotys (just under one pound). Seven pence, documented physically, on paper, three times. How many more human hands and eyes and brains will have to check those three faktury VAT? At the offices of my conference organisers, within PKP, and by platoons of bookkeepers and tax-men, in Kraków, in Warsaw and in Brussels. Activity that adds no value. Deep pools of economic inefficiency.

Surely, in today's world of iPhones and tablets, WiFi, NFC and RFID, PayPass, PayPal and online banking – surely, there is a more efficient way of collecting and accounting for taxes paid? In my previous job, in a multinational company that published hundreds of classified advertising papers and websites around the world, the corporate HQ people could not believe that here in Poland out of 87 people employed by the firm, 31 of them worked in accounts. In countries like Sweden or Holland, where turnover was several times higher, the accounts staff numbered three or four people. In Poland, where VAT is still calculated and paid in full each month by all but the smallest businesses, it is still about the manual checking of hundreds of millions of faktury VAT, many of which are for tiddly amounts of money that wouldn't merit any paperwork whatsoever in other OECD countries.

Poland has one of the most expensive and inefficient tax systems in the EU in terms of revenues collected. Is it just about the protection of armies of bookkeepers' jobs, whose soul-destroying task is to account for evidence that tiny sums have all been duly collected? Or is it an inability of middle-ranking bureaucrats to move with the times and actively seek out and implement more efficient ways of doing things? Or is it to do with low levels of social trust? That without the policing mechanism of faktury VAT, Mr Dembinski would be hanging around railway stations, dipping into dustbins to retrieve discarded train tickets, then presenting them as his own, while meanwhile making his way to Kraków on foot, so as to diddle the conference organisers (who would then be unknowingly be diddling the tax-man)?

It is time for Jacek Rostowski, Poland's UK-born and -educated finance minister to apply some big scissors to this grotesque paper-printing and accounting machine that adds no value to the Polish economy. Time to apply the Toyota method – identify the muda (activity that adds no value) to the process and cut the costs of tax collection, with a target to get them at least to the EU average.

A campaign to streamline Poland's antiquated tax-collection system should be supported by every citizen and each political party - the only people who would lose would be the armies of faktura counters - but for the rest of the economy, it would be a dead weight removed from the nation's neck.

This time last year:
An end to an Entitlement way of thinking

This time two years ago:
West Ealing - drab and sad suburb

This time three years ago:
To Poznań by train

This time five years ago:
Late autumn drive-time

Płock by night, Płock by day

To Płock to address yet another conference on Public-Private Partnerships. Having been most impressed by Toruń, I was keen to take a look around Płock, a historic city (pop. 125,000) which served as Poland's capital from 1079 to 1138. Situated on the Vistula, half-way from Warsaw (110km downstream ) to Toruń (100km upstream), the city benefits from its location, atop a steep and high escarpment looking down across the river.

After the day's work, time to take a stroll. I was last here in 2005 or '06 (pre-blogging days, anyhow), again at a conference, held in the building below, the town hall (ratusz), which dates back to the 1820s, and was the seat of the Polish insurgents' final parliament during the 1831 Uprising against Russia. If the style looks familiar, it is because it was designed by Jakub Kubicki, who was also responsible for the Belweder palace.

Below: looking down ul. Tumska towards the river, with two of the city's landmarks - to the right, the Castle of the Dukes of Masovia (Zamek książąt mazowieckich), built in the 14th C. as a Gothic fortification and topped off in the 18th C. with a Baroque upper tower and dome. To the right, the basilica cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Masovia, built in 1140.

Below: St. Bartholemew's church, built in 1356, rebuilt in the Baroque style, with a separate bell tower within the grounds. Like the cathedral and castle, the church overlooks the Vistula escarpment.

Below: the church, in daylight hours. Before leaving Płock for Warsaw, I take time to see more of the town. Behind the church, the ground falls away 40m in a dramatically steep slope towards the river bank.

  

Left: looking into a courtyard on ul. Tadeusza Kościuszki; a composition of wrought iron, plastered and unplastered brickwork and the Renaissance towers of the cathedral on the horizon.

Below: social housing (domy komunalne) overlooking ul. Mostowa in Płock. Note solid buttressing to keep the walls from sliding down the escarpment.

Below: we go down to the river, across a wide, sandy beach. The city's perched on that high escarpment to the right - and here I must mention the four-star Hotel Tumski where I stayed, an excellent location; my room on the third floor had a Most excellent view over the river. When I awoke on Friday morning, the view was misty (the Lindisfarne song Fog on the Tyne sprang to mind).

Below: looking across to the east. Across the Vistula, a granary, a small shipyard. On this side of the river, the molo (or pier) is just visible across the foreshore to the left. And in the far distance, the old bridge across the Vistula, still in use. Having such a splendid riverbank right under the historic city centre makes Płock more attractive to tourists. The waves are lapping at the shore, seagulls cry overhead.

Below: the bridge carries both roadway and a single railway track. Although the new bridge, a few km down stream, now opens the town up to road traffic much better than in the past, the lack of proper rail links is noticeable. I drove to Płock for lack of a good public transport alternative. The train journey from Jeziorki would have taken just under four hours, via W-wa Zachodnia and Kutno, an unnecessarily roundabout journey. The city needs a new rail link to Warsaw via Modlin airport, and here I wish the marshal of the Mazowsze province, Adam Struzik (who hails from Płock) good luck with his scheme to build such a rail link.

Below: Małachowianka, Poland's oldest school, dating back to 1180. The building is currently undergoing an extensive facelift, paid for out of EU funds. Famous alumni include Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland's first premier after communism (indeed first non-communist premier in all Central and Eastern Europe), Ignacy Mościcki, Poland's president from 1926 to 1939, and Jan Zumbach, leader of the legendary 303 Squadron. All would have gone to school via this historic front door.

Below: if you've not been to Płock, you may think of it this way, a communist-era monument to some communist in some nondescript square, not far from the gigantic petrochemical works. Indeed, this is statue to another local boy, Władysław Broniewski, who churned out panegyrics to Stalin. The statue is by Kazimierz Gustaw Zemła. And their stories tell of the complexity of Polish history. Broniewski fought against the Bolsheviks in 1920, winning a Virtuti Militari. He was arrested by the NKVD in Łwów in 1940 and held in the Lublyanka prison in Moscow, and sent to the Gulag, getting out of the USSR with Ander's army. And yet he returned to Poland to give praise to Stalin... Zemła taught at Warsaw's Fine Arts Academy, and authored communist-era monuments such as the one to the Silesian Uprising (which as a child I thought was of three grand pianos standing on their ends, with the shrouds left on). Yet after the downfall of communism, Zemła also gave us nine statues of Pope John Paul II and one to the heroes of the battle of Monte Cassino. Broniewski drank himself to death in 1962, unable to reconcile the contradictions in his life. Zemła is still alive (born in 1931).

So - there we are. Płock is Most certainly a historic city, Most certainly worth a visit.

This time last year:
Warning ahead of railway timetable change

This time two years ago:
London notes

This time three years ago:
Silent and Unseen - in your bookshops now

This time four years ago:
Frustrated by ul. Puławska - rat-run absurdity

This time five years ago:
Some thoughts on recycling

Warsaw's heroes on the walls

For my father, Bohdan, and for my daughter, Monika.

Left: an end wall of a kamienica (tenement) by Wilanowska Metro/bus station, commemorating Stanisław Grzesiuk, a noted Warsaw street musician. The street art depicts him as Syn Ulicy ('Son of the Street') with the sub-title Szemrane Piosenki ('murmured songs' or 'shady/dodgy songs'). Today's young artists have a fascination with the people who made Warsaw what it is; the characters, the lore, the slang, the unbreakable spirit. Grzesiuk, playing the banjo in the courtyards (podwórka) of Warsaw kamienice, embodied a tradition to be encountered today in the performances of Orkiestra z Chmielnej, who still play the old songs. Catch them by Metro Centrum after 11:00 most weekday mornings.

Below: an end wall of a kamienica between ul. Okrzei and Kłopotowskiego depicting four Home Army (AK) soldiers and the Polska Walczącza logo against a map of Our City and the Vistula running red, an allusion to Red Runs the Vistula, the book written by Ron Jeffery, an English PoW who escaped from the Germans and fought alongside the AK. I see in these faces of the young men the face of my father as a young man, who participated in the Warsaw Uprising from the beginning through to the bitter end. The hair styles, the faces, the clothing; each one looks familiar and brings to mind portraits of my father as a young man.

A propos of which - is it Warsaw Uprising - or Warsaw Rising? If you've not done this yet, do have a look at Google's fascinating NGram viewer. With this tool, you can track how words or phrases gain and lose popularity over the years. So I enter 'Warsaw Uprising' and 'Warsaw Rising'. And here's the result (click to enlarge):

This suggests that immediately after the event, the preferred English term for Powstanie was 'Rising', but by 1960, the term 'Uprising' had overtaken it. Why? And why the sudden spike in popularity for 'Rising' after 2000, but before Norman Davies' book Rising '44 The Battle for Warsaw was published in 2003? So - for the past half a century, Uprising has the edge on Rising in terms of the canon of published work in the English language.

This time last year:
Tax dodge or public service?

This time two years ago:
Warsaw's woodlands in autumn

This time three years ago:
Still here, the early snow

This time four years ago:
Another point of view