I needed to get out.
Apart from the odd school or shop run, I’d
been stuck in the flat for the best part of three weeks. Part of the time I’d been battling Man Flu
(still am, for that matter), and for a bigger part I’d been on babysitting
duties as one or both of the kids had been off sick from school with a variety
of viruses and colds, while My Beloved had been out and about a lot attending
to some pressing family business with her mum.
Daytime tv, especially CBeebies or Disney Junior, does not I’m afraid
hold the attention for long, and nor does multiple viewings of Mamma Mia! or Tangled, no matter what my Princess may say. And as for staring at my laptop screen,
waiting for an e-mail or Skype message to pop up telling me I have a job to go
to after Christmas – well, after a three week near silence on that front the
anticipatory excitement had long faded.
The charms of the BBC, Guardian and Newsweek websites, and very definitely
Facebook, had also faded, and even spending time working on the book no longer
floated my boat.
No, I needed a change of scenery.
That’s the biggest trouble with this
extended gardening leave (or if you prefer, notice period). After 13 years of more or less constant
travelling, averaging two or three flights a week, total mileage in that time
getting on for half a million, this constant inactivity, in one place (and don’t
get me wrong I love my home!) is driving me up the wall now. Patience, as my dear old mum used to say, is
a virtue – and it is, but now and then I like to see something other than the
view of KEN, and the MarcPol supermarket and the apartment blocks across the
road.
* * *
So yesterday, after the school run, I went
off on the metro. I thought perhaps a
walk around the city centre might cheer me up a bit, even on a grey winters’
day, with a temperature of minus several.
I armed myself with some reading material and my iPod, selected Hector
Berlioz’ Symphanie Fantastique for my
opening soundtrack, and off I went.
When I first came to Warsaw, back in 2000,
there was a single Metro line running for a dozen stops from Centrum to Kabaty
on the southern edge of the city. A few
hundred metres stroll further on from the end of the line and you come to the
Las Kabacki forest, with its cycle tracks, footpaths, and picnic areas. It’s not exactly a wilderness but it’s
countryside, and very green and pleasant in summer. The line northwards was still under
construction, but it’s finished now and runs a further dozen or so stops, and
is very cheap and efficient and comfortable.
Rush hours, like metro lines the world over, are crowded and unpleasant,
but off-peak it’s fine with trains every three minutes or so from about 5 a.m.
to about midnight. Last year
construction started on an east to west line, that will pass under the Wisla
river. It seems to be very slow going,
and there are no stations opened yet, and massive construction sites in the
city centre where existing stations are being extended and new ones added, all
of which adds to Warsaw’s chaotic traffic.
The city is quite compact, certainly in
comparison with London, but has a wealth of public transport options. In addition to the Metro, there is a
comprehensive bus service, an extensive tram network and more cabs than you can
count. All of them are relatively cheap and
efficient and offer good value. I can
hop a Metro from the station outside my block and be in the city centre in 15
minutes. Recently there have been a
number of park-and-ride options added, that allow people to commute in from out
of town under their own steam, park cheaply next to certain Metro stations then
take advantage of the public transport networks. By 8 a.m., the park-and-ride by the bus
terminus next door to our block is full, and late comers park wherever they can
– which means that by 8:30 all the visitors’ spaces in the block’s car park are
taken and cars are double parked or dumped on the footpaths outside by the
station entrances. It’s a nightmare, and
the traffic on KEN, the main road that runs past the block from Kabaty to pick
up the main Niepodleglosci and Pulawska roads into the town centre, about a kilometre
past where we live, is always heavy from about 5 a.m. to midnight, every day
(weekends included). The traffic noise is constant, and you get
used to it or suffer it, there are no other choices.
So within 20 minutes or so of leaving home,
I came up the escalator at Centrum.
There is a forecourt there, below road level, that has always been, and
continues to be, a magnet for all kinds of street entertainers and hawkers. My favourite is a bloke who clearly imagines
he’s Keith Moon or Buddy Rich or someone, and spends his days playing a more or
less constant ragged drum solo. But his
drum kit is an old wooden dining room chair and his sticks a couple of wooden
kitchen spoons. He was there yesterday,
as usual, and the cap on the chair seat, used to collect donations, was empty,
as usual. There was also a tv camera
crew setting up, and a big 10 foot square mobile screen playing a speech made
by General Jaruzelski, then ruling the country, announcing martial law and a 9 p.m.
to 7 a.m. curfew back in December 1981, as he struggled the contain the
Solidarity revolution and preserve communist rule (yesterday was the
anniversary of this event). Thankfully,
he ultimately failed.
* * *
I strolled from the Metro station towards
the main railway station, using the adjoining Srodmiescie entrance. The station, Dworzec Centralny, has always fascinated
me. Architecturally, it’s a bit of a monstrosity,
the main ticket hall being a big grey concrete block rising just next to the
old Stalinist Palace of Culture. The
bulk of the station is under ground level, a vast cavern through which runs a series
of tracks for both local (suburban) lines and intercity services. The tracks are on different levels and there
is also a huge mall of small shops and restaurants in the maze of tunnels
linking the various parts of the station.
There are also exits to various tram and bus stops. The place is like a sauna in summer and a
refrigerator in winter, and in my memory always stank if stale piss and
tobacco. It was a gift from Russia to
the Polish people, and was opened on the day Brezhnev paid a state visit back
in the 70s – his was the first train (all the way from Moscow, of course) to
use the station, and as he and his accompanying party of KGB guards and
welcoming Polish minions walked through the halls to the fleet of limousines
awaiting them outside, the team of painters and decorators who were still
putting the finishing touches to the interior were hustled away and hidden from
view, to continue their work after he had gone.
In the past couple of years a lot of work
has been done to clean and modernise the place, as far as it’s possible to do
so. A lot of it was done with this year’s
Euro 2012 hosting in mind, but the place needed sprucing up anyway. Most of the corridors have been cleaned and
repainted with white or light pastel colours to brighten them up, and they have
been scrubbed clean and fumigated – I didn’t catch the old familiar odours at
all. There is new tunnel full of shops
and cafes that is very light an airy, with a direct entrance to the relatively
new Zlote Tarasy shopping mall. The platforms
too have been cleaned and re-decorated, as has the main ticket hall – as befits
what is now an international station. The intercity section (now with its own lounge
for first class passengers, not dissimilar to an airport business lounge)
serves not only trains to Krakow and Lublin and Poznan and Gdansk and all the
other Polish destinations, but places further afield too. As I strolled along the corridor, looking down
on the platforms, an express service to Poznan and Berlin Hauptbahnhof came
in. Other services to Prague, Moscow,
Basle, and Amsterdam were scheduled for the next half an hour…..some journeys
there I’d love to make myself!
* * *
I wandered into Zlote Tarasy. This is the newest mall in central Warsaw,
opening maybe three years ago. It’s not
the best mall in town, but the design, featuring a big curvy glass roof over
the main atrium, is interesting, and makes the place bright and airy when the
sun shines. All the normal stores and
food outlets are there, and it’s surrounded by towering office blocks that have
radically changed the skyline since I first came here. The mall stands on a piece of land between
the Central Station and the Holiday Inn hotel, which is where I spent my first
couple of months in Warsaw, before the bank placed me in an apartment. At that time the land was used as a car
park, so the front entrance to the hotel was quite bright and open. With the building of Zlote Tarasy this is no
longer the case: the Holiday inn is now surrounded on all sides by tower blocks
higher than itself so there can no longer be anything resembling a room with a
view. I do wonder how trade has been
affected by this. When I stayed there,
it was a pretty good hotel. The rooms
were very comfortable, and every day I had a complementary International Herald
Tribune newspaper delivered and found a king sized Mars or Snickers Bar on my
pillow when I got back after work. There
was a decent fitness centre with sauna and Jacuzzi that I used from time to
time, and the bar and restaurant were good meeting places for all our projects
teams (at the time we had a couple running in Warsaw, so there were getting on
for 20 people here). I remember there
was a middle aged hooker in the bar every night, looking for business. We called her (rather unkindly) Monkey
Face. None of us ever used her services,
but one night, after a particularly good evening where more than the usual
number of Zywiec beers were put away (I think it was someone’s birthday), my
mate decided to have a bit of a laugh.
He invited her to his room, and she agreed with alacrity (she never
seemed to do any business to speak of).
In the lift between the Lobby and the fifth floor, where his room was,
he managed to haggle her price down from PLN150 to just 10, then as they were leaving
the lift, put his arm across in front of her, pressed the Ground Floor button,
and said, “No, can’t be bothered.” Apparently she burst into tears. Cruel man, that Dan. To put that money into context: at that time
our per diem rate was PLN250 per day, and the exchange rate was over PLN7.50 to
the pound. Everything was very cheap
then, and we lived very well on the money – I never came close to spending an
entire days’ allowance in one day. We
figured you would need to eat two good meals a day and use taxis everywhere to
do that. Since then, prices have gone
up quite a bit and the exchange rate is now just over 5 to the pound.
Anyway, I went to a little coffee bar, called
Cawa, on the second floor overlooking the atrium, and settled into an armchair outside
with a latte to read my book for a while and watch the world go by. The coffee was okay, not up to Starbucks
standard, but adequate, and came with a free shot of Bailey’s liqueur in a
little glass. You’ve probably seen in some places the
servers do a little pattern in the foam – usually it looks like a leaf or
something simple. The guy at Cawa was
clearly getting into the festive spirit (the sound system in the mall was
playing carols) – he did a really good reindeer head in my foam. I still can’t figure out how he did it, even
with eyes and nostrils…….smart guy. I
stayed there half an hour, reading, while Berlioz gave way to Coldplay’s Left Right Left, a free concert download
I picked up a few years ago – really good (I’m sorry, I happen to like
Coldplay). The book is called I, Partridge: We need to talk about Alan. It’s a spoof autobiography of Steve
Coogan’s finest comic creation, and is hilarious. It’s written in the style of the character,
and is illustrated with stills from the various tv series, with the most
ridiculously complex captions. There are
also footnotes on virtually every page that illustrate the text, including some
that refer to a playlist built from three days solid study of Partridge’s iPod (he
writes in the introduction)– all typical of the Great Man’s musical tastes as
broadcast on his Radio Norfolk show…. ;-))
I bought it in Malta earlier this
year and thoroughly recommend it.
* * *
After that, I decided to move on, and
headed off to catch a tram to another mall, Arkadia, that is one of the biggest
in Europe apparently.
Like everything else, the tram service in
Warsaw has improved a lot in my time here.
The network is pretty much the same (I don’t think there are any new
routes at all) but the cars themselves have improved tremendously. Back in 2000, all the cars were rickety old
things, unheated and with hard, un-upholstered plastic seats, that jerked and
lurched slowly along rusty tracks. They
were overcrowded and frequently broke down.
Since joining the EU, a lot of the money from the development funds
received by the government has been spent modernizing the entire fleet, and the
vast majority of them are now new and comfortable, with padded seating, decent
heating systems and instead of tacky advertising posters and stations lists
pasted to the windows (thus obscuring the view) there are now flat screen tv’s
that carry constantly changing adverts, route listings and news stories. All very pleasant, and still very cheap to
travel on.
Arkadia was crowded with shoppers as the
pre-Christmas rush gathers pace. I spent a while browsing in the American (English
language) Bookshop branch there, and spotted half a dozen volumes I’d like to
buy at some point, but resisted the temptation to spend anything, then wandered
around a Saturn electrical store looking at external hard-drives (I need to buy
one for this beast) – again, I kept my hands firmly in my pockets with my wallet. By this time, my soundtrack had moved on to a
Chris Rea compilation, Still So Far To Go
and I was getting peckish, so my next stop was Coffee Heaven for a large latte
and a turkey, brie and cranberry sandwich (plus another half hour of Alan
Partridge).
* * *
By this time, it was early afternoon, and I
felt much better for getting away from the flat. I’d had enough, and my Man Flu was nagging at
me, coughing and spluttering like an old man, and struggling not to sneeze more
than once every couple of minutes, so I decided to head home. I caught another tram, down the hill a
couple of stops to the Dworzec Gdanski Metro station, and hopped a train
home. It had been a nice couple of
hours, and I reflected that Warsaw has changed a lot in my ten years or so
living here….and apart from the heavier traffic and higher prices, largely for
the better. Although there is still
poverty here, as there is in every major city, by and the large the average
Varsovian is financially better off than when I arrived. Although prices have increased, wages have
too. The workforce is younger and better educated,
and increasingly English is spoken (especially in the under 35 age group) in
stores and bars and restaurants, almost as a matter of course. A lot of this is down to changes in the
education system where English (and French, German, Spanish and Italian) have
replaced Russian as the second language taught.
There are also language schools scattered throughout the city now. But it’s also because the majority of young
Poles who left the country after EU accession to work in the UK and elsewhere
have now returned home, better qualified and with language skills honed by the
time away. Although the Polish plumber
still exists across the UK, most of them have now come back to work in the booming
construction industry here as the country continues to modernise rapidly and
new roads and buildings spring up everywhere.
The Warsaw skyline has changed too. In 2000, the tallest building was still the
Palace of Culture in the centre, with the Marriott Hotel opposite a little
shorter. Others were under construction - the Warsaw Trade Tower, a little to the
west of centre, the Bank Austria building behind the Palace and others. They’re all finished now, and more are
mushrooming across the city. Many are
modern office buildings, but many also are new apartment blocks that continue
to provide the favoured home here.
Housing, as we would understand it in the UK, neighbourhoods of
identical terraced, semi- or detached properties, exist but are few and far
between, because there is relatively little available building land, at least
in central Warsaw. So apartment blocks
still rule the roost – there is a new one under construction in the centre, 30
floors or so, that is state of the art, and offers penthouses at PLN3million or
thereabouts – way out of my league.
Road-works remain more or less constant, as
they have done since my arrival. They
are now not only to improve traffic flow in the city itself – like the new road
out to the airport from where I live – but to get to Warsaw too. There are highways (or stretches of motorway
standard road) on the way to the coast, from Torun to Gdansk, that reduces the
travel time from Warsaw to the seaside by a couple of hours; on the road to
Lublin that eases traffic flow to and from Ukraine; between Warsaw and Krakow,
Poznan, Wroclaw and the mountains. Some
of them are toll roads, but the tolls are quite cheap and well worth paying for
the improved journeys. Of course, these
roads need to link up with the city, so there are many big construction sites
doing just that. Right now, it can be a
bit of a nightmare, but in a couple of years it will be much better getting in
and out of Warsaw than it currently is getting in and out of say London.
I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather live
right now.
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