The changing face of Warsaw

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. 

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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.

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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!

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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. 

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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).

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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.