“We’re on a road to nowhere, come on inside, takin’ that ride to nowhere, we’ll take that ride” Talking Heads “Road to Nowhere” If you were to take a drive in an easterly direction from Krakow city centre, towards Nowa Huta, and travel on Aleja Pokoju, you would find one of Krakow’s newest roads. It [...]
For the past four weeks, Britian’s The Guardian newspaper has run a series it has called New Europe. It has spent one week each analysing Germany, France, Spain and finally in the past week, Poland. The introduction to the series says “Who are our neighbours? Too often Europe is discussed and reported through its common [...]
I have only one wish in life: I would like a simple, efficient bedside lamp. Actually I have two wishes, but the second one is for a sitcom about former Arab dictators sharing a flat in Brixton (Hosni! Have you been eating my humus again!?), which would be much more difficult to organise. Or at [...]
Here’s a cool and non-controversial thingy: maps of Warsaw and Krakow superimposed with visualizations of where people take photos. They were created by a chap called Eric Fischer, along with a lot of similar maps of other cities that you can see on his flickr page. Using location data added to photos on Flickr and [...]
Eighteen people killed in a minibus—several million wondering if they will be next. Anyone who has been on one of these rattling deathtraps has been expecting this. There are tens of thousands of them on Poland’s roads, most of them operated by tiny companies and almost all of them alarmingly substandard. The thousands of minibus [...]
I’ve been following the planning and building of Krakow’s new pedestrian bridge for what seems like most of my life but has in fact only been two years. Today was the culmination: in glorious Autumn sunshine I made my first crossing, the bridge itself having inconveniently been opened in the middle of last week. My [...]
I am fascinated by scale models. There is something quintessentially human about making miniature versions of real-world objects. It is this ability to represent the world in a manageable and manipulable form that makes us what we are. The making of models, or sculptures, came long before the invention of writing and is clearly its [...]
This is the first in a series of four articles on eating off the beaten track in Krakow. There are many decent places in Krakow to eat and everyone knows it. However, not everyone knows where to go for a quiet meal, a smoke-free atmosphere, a place with good or even great service, thoughtful décor, [...]
This photo was taken in Krakow in 1941, according to the notes that accompany it. The wartime date and the city are confirmed by the destination plate on the back of the tram: Adolf Hitler Platz was the new name given to the Rynek Głowny by the occupying Germans. That’s all clear enough. What I don’t understand is what the hell is going on here.
Three years I’ve lived here, and not once did anybody mention Pub Katedra to me. Three years. If I didn’t know you better, I’d suspect foul play. I have terrible thoughts of the whole of Poland smirking silently while I raved on about the impossibility of finding good beer in this country. You wouldn’t do [...]