Warsaw is a Beautiful City
“Warsaw is a beautiful city.” Polanski was right. But to see the expressions on the faces of most Warsawites on the buses and trams, it seems that beauty is lost on them. They have other things on their minds, like trying to make a living, where the average Pole takes home about 1500zl (approximately $US 500) per month.
The magnificence of the Palace of Culture doesn’t pay the rent, however breathtaking and exotic it may seem to the western visitor. It was a “gift” from Stalin to the people of Warsaw, completed in 1956, and was the tallest building in the city throughout the communist period. Indeed, there was a law that stipulated that no building in the city could be higher.
Warsaw is an interesting city visually, a combination of the very old and the very new. I'd describe it as a city that is physically, politically and indeed, psychologically, between the not-yet and the no-longer. On the one hand you've got all these vestiges of the communist period in terms of architecture and infrastructure, and then the new presence of billboards, western consumerism and these goods that few people can afford; everything from designer clothes to cars and appliances.
It’s been fifteen years since the collapse of the communist system here, and this country where the Warsaw Pact was signed is now both a NATO and EU member; and yet, the past seems to continue to permeate so many aspects of daily life for its people— its landscape mired somewhere between an irrecoverable past and an uncertain future.
The magnificence of the Palace of Culture doesn’t pay the rent, however breathtaking and exotic it may seem to the western visitor. It was a “gift” from Stalin to the people of Warsaw, completed in 1956, and was the tallest building in the city throughout the communist period. Indeed, there was a law that stipulated that no building in the city could be higher.
Warsaw is an interesting city visually, a combination of the very old and the very new. I'd describe it as a city that is physically, politically and indeed, psychologically, between the not-yet and the no-longer. On the one hand you've got all these vestiges of the communist period in terms of architecture and infrastructure, and then the new presence of billboards, western consumerism and these goods that few people can afford; everything from designer clothes to cars and appliances.
It’s been fifteen years since the collapse of the communist system here, and this country where the Warsaw Pact was signed is now both a NATO and EU member; and yet, the past seems to continue to permeate so many aspects of daily life for its people— its landscape mired somewhere between an irrecoverable past and an uncertain future.
posted by Bobby B at 3:32 PM
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