I’m always very ambitious about documenting my trips to Warsaw. It is, indeed, a very special city and quite like nothing any one in London have seen. Potentially great blog material, especially now, that the city is coming to live with more artistic and cultural enterprises than one can count. So every time I go I ambitiously pack a HD camcorder (with addition gear: external mics, tele adapters…) and a faithful digital SLR (with even more gear: 3 sets of lenses, endless batteries, memory cards, flash guns and so on). The moment I arrive, having dragged a suitcase way heavier than necessary (see: the gear), preciously unpack it – and that’s pretty much where it stays.

There’s never good time to take photos while I’m home. For starters I tend to be ridiculously busy trying to cram all the people I want to see into the 2 weeks I usually have, trying to go all the places I can’t go through the rest of the year and trying to rest at the same time. Secondly taking photos remove you from the situation to an extent. It’s a step back from a given moment and place in order to focus on seeing it as a composition. And when you’re given only 2 weeks in the time and place and with the people you hardly want to remove yourself. So I always put it off till tomorrow, always plan photographic trips that there is never time to go on in the end.

So here comes my latest (and possibly final, if it fails) attempt: a Warsaw photo blog. I hereby commit to a photo every other day (I need a day breather in between) – marked with this stamp. In case you’re wondering the car pictured is a 1950s genius of polish engineering called FSO Warsaw, one of the first cars to ever be driven in Poland on a mass scale. You can see the national pride in its full glory here. Also, rather ingeniously portrayed here.

To start us of here goes the controversial landmark of Poland’s capital. We got it as a gift from brotherly government of the USSR in 1995. It’s called Palace of Culture and Science and was originally dedicated to the name of Joseph Stalin. That was, dear kids, before Khrushchev’s speech of 1956 about the crimes of Stalin’s era. It was also – more famously – at the center joke of one of Poland’s most beloved comedies ‘Killer‘. Another anecdote is that approximately 4000 builders who took part in the construction lived in barracks, in a specially build neighborhood, with it’s own cinema and club. Later on the barracks were transformed into student accommodation (yes, students and builders always get the best deal) where yours truly attended some of her first proper house parties at the age of about 15. But mainly it is controversial because it came to be a symbol of Warsaw’s landscape, even though – as a proper representative of modernist architecture of socialist realism, or socrealism – it is indeed fairly ugly. This is how it looks at night in monochrome. 

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