I have been on the road a lot in the last few weeks. We were in Warsaw, among other places, and then in Krakow. I had a completely different idea of Warsaw beforehand. What I hadn’t realised in any case was that an incredible amount had been destroyed. So there was a lot of new construction. So it’s a small metropolis of new buildings in the middle of old buildings from the time when I was born. I hoped for a feeling of being “at home” in a foreign place. Simply because I spent a short part of my life growing up in a real socialist state that was dependent on the Soviet Union. Just like other Eastern Bloc countries at that time.
I come from East Berlin. My memories fluctuate between buildings from that time and old buildings that were largely in a very poor condition. Many buildings have this grey, dirty plaster that makes everything look the same. A Soviet uniformity.
You can’t choose where you come from, and the first years certainly shape you more than you would like. So, living in a neighbouring country where there was no Soviet construction and no uniformity, I am looking for a piece of home. So I travel to the neighbouring Eastern Bloc countries and look for my aesthetic “home”. Sometimes I am disappointed, as in small places near the Austrian border, where little has happened.
So I hoped for the full charge from Warsaw. The Palace of Culture was quite an impressive building. I had to think a little of brutalist buildings. Here is the article on Wikipedia about this palace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Culture_and_Science . The palace itself is not a brutalist building.
At some point I want to see most of these buildings here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Bauwerken_des_Brutalismus I’m using the German link here because the English one has no pictures.
A highlight was indeed the Warsaw Hackerspace. https://youtu.be/mMrfKu_ObVM here is an older video of them. However, they have confused Stallman with Wau Holland or this is just some troll stuff. When we were there, it was much more orderly and not so crowded, they really put a lot of work into it. One of my highlights on site was an old telephone with which you could call the Pope (John Paul the 2nd), who would then say some random shit 🙂 Unfortunately, it wasn’t working at the time. We were also on the roof, where my companion almost had a heart attack because I was standing too close to the edge. Hm.
Anyway, there were John Paul 2 memes and scultures everywhere, so it was all troll stuff, very likeable. There was only one person on site who had opened the door especially for us. Here’s another thank you to you, gadzer.
Here are a few photographic impressions from the Hackspace:
We also visited the pinball museum. Unfortunately, many machines were out of order. In addition, such a gambling den is usually very loud and stuffy, but we still spent 3 hours playing pinball ad nauseam. <3
Four of us played and I even won 1…2 times. Well, purely in terms of graphics, a pinball machine from the 80s is a real highlight.
Our accommodation was in the old town. We probably should have had a flat in the city centre – the “new city centre” – for the real untouristy feeling. So we were surrounded by Pirogi and Lody. And churches, of course. A colleague of mine said “the restaurant next to the church was great”. Hm yes.
Remarkable were inventive names for kebab shops that sounded even more entertaining in Polish. In general, many words that sound or read cute because they end in the letter “i” or “y”.
All in all, it was strange there. It was so new and familiar at the same time. I missed some of the buildings I know from Bratislava. Maybe I wasn’t exactly looking for them. Maybe I’ll report back later with a short report from Krakow, because that’s where we were afterwards. And it was pretty much completely different.
