2023 Overseas Travel Blog
#2 Warsaw…
For the first few nights, I splashed out on a nice hotel in central Warsaw (Old Town) because I wanted to feel like I had arrived in Europe. Modern hotels look the same the world over. Royal Castle Square Apartment looks out onto Castle Square across from what was a Royal Palace, now a museum.
First impressions were how green and well-treed the city is, which held true for the whole country.
I took a tour of Old Town Warsaw and explored the area within walking distance.
Would it surprise you to learn that Brisbane has a larger population and its buildings are older than Warsaw’s? Of course Warsaw has a much longer settled history, but the little Dutch house in Coopers Plains I’m trying to have preserved as a history cafe is as old as most of Warsaw’s buildings.
Warsaw was destroyed near the end of WW2 by the Nazis as an act of reprisal and then rebuilt, brick by brick. I wondered who paid for the rebuilding because the Polish economy was devastated. This inquiry turned into something culturally instructive about Poles, I believe.
Initially, I thought of the US Marshall Plan which paid for a lot of the rebuilding of western Europe. But Poland was in the Soviet sphere, so it seemed logical that the Soviets paid for it. My Polish neighbour in Brisbane matter-of-factly said they did it themselves. I asked my tour guide and was only told the Castle (pictured opposite my room) was crowd-funded in the 1980s. I really had to dig across several websites to discover that the Poles really did do it themselves single-handedly — “the sole source of financing was the donations made by the people to the Social Fund for the Rebuilding of the Capital (SFOS)… with donations and labourers coming from all around Poland, with plenty of volunteer work. The widespread enthusiasm, which was caught on newsreels from the period, cannot be dismissed as a Communist propaganda. In fact, it may have been required for the project to happen in the first place.” People began rebuilding with their hands before any official organizing took place. It was an “indisputable social achievement. It provided many people with not only a place to live, but chance at a new start. This concerned whole social classes, who had formerly been all but excluded from participation in urban life.”
I think it’s a testament to Polish modesty and self-reliance that this is little known achievement was difficult to uncover.
No doubt there was motivation to give the Nazis the finger and prove their indomitability, having lost their nation for more than a hundred years (1800s). Some called for the capital to be moved to Lodz and the destruction at Warsaw to be preserved as a testament to the horror of war. There was a danger in rebuilding that its destruction would be forgotten. Pulling down statues of slave-traders risks the same amnesia, in my opinion.
A potato dish — pierogi — is the national food icon, and they’re big into pavlova — beza. I’m learning a little Polish to get by, but my first attempt at ordering orange juice landed me with 3 glasses of it. A lot of Poles speak some English — especially the young ones. I’m mastering the really useful expressions to lubricate relations; sorry (przepraszam), thanks (dzeikuje), good morning (dzien dobry), yes (tak), no (nie) and the one I’m best at ‘I don’t speak Polish’ (ja nie mowie Polski), which I take so long to say it isn’t that useful.
The architecture is a mix of Communist era buildings including a ‘gift’ from Stalin, the Palac Kultury i Nauki. There are modern skyscrapers and even a Westfield!
When David arrived we stuck a deal to go out Saturday night to a gentlemen’s club — where we almost got ripped off — and a gay club which had the best dance floor music.
Rubbish collection incorporates recycling quite well. The trucks pick up wheelie bins like ours but smaller and they need someone to attach them to the back.
Looks like a stage is going up right outside my flat… oh no, it must be a loud concert that’ll go on all night!? But, no. This is Poland. It’ll be a speech by some politicians…
We went to a Chopin recital at the Chopin Monument (video link here) at midday Sunday and …
… on the way back noticed a huge crowd gathering (click for video) …
… which turned out to be a pro-democracy rally celebrating the anniversary of the first free elections and against the current conservative party government (PIS). They were all heading towards and converging on Castle Square. It took us an hour to walk 4 klms back through the crowd of 500,000 people from all over Poland. That’s Donald Tusk speaking on the platform, former EU President and PM of Poland. Apart from the size of the crowd, what was distinctive was the number of flags and unity… quite a contrast to Australian demonstrations. The current government apparently achieved a majority with only 32% of the popular vote, like the ALP did last year. However, voting isn’t compulsory, so the PIS’s 30% could represent a larger percentage of votes cast. Poland is very ethnically homogeneous and the social cohesion is apparent in many ways. One trivial example is how everyone keeps right on the pavements. The divisions seem to be political and limited. Poland is what Shirley Newman calls a viscous population.
Population viscosity is characterized by living long-term in the same territory with limited dispersal, and being endogamous, involving marriage within one’s tribe, clan or community (Dawkins, 2016: p. 282; Newman, 2023: p. 22). Viscous populations, through the consolidation of kinship relations, increase trust and the capacity for individuals within groups to effectively organise for political actions (Newman, 2023: p. 48), compared to dispersed, atomized populations (Newman, 2023, 44).
By contrast, you could say Australia is a diversity dictatorship by cultural decree.
We had to check out of the room and gratefully, were allowed to leave late. To get to the train station for Mstow (David’s town), we decided to avoid the crowd out the front and clamber over a 2 meter high locked iron gate and fence down the side lane with our bags. David went first and after the bags, I went, thinking ‘my insurance definitely doesn’t cover this’, but once I was over, the locals who had been watching from their coffee tables cheered and applauded!
Stay tuned for the next post:
Originally published at http://equanimity.blog on June 8, 2023.
