20 east

We ate at the QA restaurant today, which is housed at the rear of palac Ujazdowskie, home of the museum of modern art. Having downed our pea soup, mushroom soup, kaszanka, potato pancakes and sweet pancakes (best kaszanka in town by the way), we decided to wander around the art exhibits.

We visit perhaps two or three times a year and there is always something different on display. This is not a modern art museum where you’ll find the kind of stuff we saw at the Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, nor indeed like any other MOMA style exhibit. This is usually very recent work by people you’ve never heard of at the extreme weird end of the spectrum. Do not enter with any hope of leaving more enlightened than when you entered. Our usual expression on leaving is one of amusement mixed with confusion.

They have at the moment a kind of retrospective of some of the more popular past exhibits. There were at least 3 rooms that were not suitable for kids so Zosia had to be sidetracked. One involved a guy cutting a swastika into his palm with a razor blade, another showed a (possibly mad) naked woman mooching around in what looked like a gas chamber and the third had a disgusting close-up video of things happening to female front and back bottoms (more than one woman involved I think although I didn’t examine for very long you understand!).

The other exhibits were the usual mix of stacked bricks, cardboard boxes, odd videos and assorted junk hung on the wall in a meaningful way. You really do have to wonder sometimes just how blurred the distinction is between artist and lunatic.

Such is the ridiculous nature of the majority of it that when we came across a messy table with a broom (see picture) we were genuinely not sure if this was an exhibit or if the workmen hanging pictures were taking a tea break!

I have seen some stunning modern art that might be in a similar category as this stuff but it is very rare and has never yet made it to Warsaw. The best part used to be a shop selling work of the students (we have numerous pieces at home) but for some reason they closed the shop a few years ago and just left us with the cranky exhibits.

Hopefully, when the new MOMA opens by the river this crap will be left in Ujazdowskie and we’ll get some decent stuff to look at instead.

Oooh! A giant hedgehog just wandered across the terrace as I sit writing this. Cute (but is it art!).

Pictures show:
1. The workers mess / art.
2. A bunch of tubes with a small TV
3. Another small TV in a huge room

EDIT – guest has just pointed out that there’s a ‘proper’ modern art museum in the centre of Warsaw HERE. I’ll check it out and let you know if it’s an improvement on the Ujazdowskie one.

As of right now, I officially give up trying to get a decent Chinese meal in Warsaw!

I love Chinese food and when living in London was spoilt for choice for places to go for an excellent Chinese meal. For some reason, I know not why, it has proved impossible to replicate that experience over here. If you do manage to find a Chinese restaurant the menu is quite different to the UK, the taste is certainly very different and they have a tendency to over complicate things. In the UK if you order, for example, lemon chicken, that’s all you get is a plate with lemon chicken on it and you order the rice, noodles, veg separately. Here you’ll get a plate so full of stuff it’s hard to find the chicken. This is annoying because part of the whole Chinese experience is to order a bunch of different dishes and tuck in to a varied feast. If you do that here you end up with enough food to feed the whole district. As for trying to find what I used to call “crispy pancake duck”, forget about it!

So, it was with a sense of building excitement that we ventured out today to try a large Chinese restaurant on the road between Warsaw and Konstancin called “Mandarin” that has widely publicised itself as being the best Chinese in Warsaw, even with proper imported chefs!

You can see from the side view that this was built as a house and some enterprising restaurateur has slapped a Chinese façade on it and opened for business. Not sure I’d want to live in that house behind it!

Anyway, with a Maserati parked outside the restaurant looked promising but it was to prove a major anti-climax, apart from the price, which was Maserati style. It’s a funny place in a strange location although perhaps in some ways clever because it is almost half way between Warsaw and Konstancin so although neither group have easy access it is a shortish drive from both. It was very busy when we arrived at around 15:00 today but we managed to find a table upstairs. The menu looked good and might even have had the crispy pancake duck (if that was what they called “Beijing duck”) but at 159 PLN we decided not to bother trying. We ordered various starters, a wonton soup and a couple of main dishes with fried rice and noodles.

First off it took an age to get served but it was fun listening to all the complaints around us from other tables, one of whom decided after half an hour and three different tables to resign and leave. The starters were good, crispy prawns a little tasteless and therefore not worth the 32 zlots but the dim sum and spring rolls were fine. The soup, which we asked to come with the starters arrived with the main course and was a bit wishy-washy. The noodles turned out to be a dish the size of Latvia of which 20% was noodles and the rest was huge chunks of vegetables and scrambled egg. The rice arrived a few minutes after everything else and was plain white rice instead of the fried rice we ordered. The duck “Chinese style” was the usual naff duck breast and so it was only the thin slices of pork in a doodah-whatsit sauce that deserved any real attention. We skipped desert but ordered coffee, which arrived cold.

The average food and poor service were bad enough but when they came with a bill of 310 zlots I nearly fell off my chair. That’s $108, 70 GBP and €75 in hard currency. Not worth half of that my friends! Cross this place off the list, cross Chinese food off the list. Damn! Damn! Damn! When is someone going to get this right?

On the way home we decided to wiggle our way round the back streets between the main road and the river. As usual when we do this we end up passing the electricity/heating plant “Siekierki”, always a wondrous sight. Apparently, Marta had a school trip to this place when she was a lass, I wouldn’t mind having a tour myself.

We then went on a hunt for Czerniakowskie lake, a stump of water that was possibly at one time a part of a wider Wisła until it silted up and ended up stranded inland. We found it.

As you can see, it’s not a lonely and unloved place. With a small beach, boats, fishing huts and swans to feed it was a hive of activity and is apparently a pretty popular destination in good weather, as we had today. Funniest thing was that just as Marta had finished telling me how they often had trouble with the water quality here when a little girl wandered over waving something slippery and shouting “Look Dad, I found a dead fish!”. As if to prove how popular it is, someone even went to the trouble of painting a lot of rules on the side of a derelict building!

We had a little walkabout and then, after a fruitless hunt for a “Port Czerniakowskie”, we headed home. Not before I managed to catch the reflection of the chimneys in the lake though.

Panorama

(poor quality but you get the message)

Unfortunately, pBase has crashed and I’m not able to use the gallery for images right now so the sizes will have to be whatever is possible in WordPress. This crash will also mean various images on this blog will be unavailable until it is fixed. They are working on it and have been for three days now so I hope it will be sorted soon and we won’t have lost much/any data.

Back in February I reported on the plans for construction of a new bridge across the Wisła (Vistula) river here in Warsaw. It comes very close to where we live so we’re able to see progress on a daily basis. We decided to take a closer look yesterday.

In the panorama above, the river is straight ahead flowing right to left. The bridge will cross the river roughly centre of the picture where you can just see a pile-driver sticking up (just above the street lamp). If you follow the link back to the earlier post, I’m standing roughly where the yellow blob is.

There have been convoys of large trucks coming and going from the site, as one would expect, removing unwanted earth and rubble and bringing mostly sand. The work is scattered around a fairly large area with bigger levelling and drainage works happening on the land that was already empty and selected columns and supports being erected along Wislostrada and beyond.

Ground levelling

Support columns

Wisłostrada

Most of these pictures were taken from a footbridge going over the Wisłostrada. As we climbed the steps I couldn’t help but wonder if we were safe doing so looking at the condition they were in.

In need of repair

You might make the case that these have been left to rot for 20 years or so because they were one day to be demolished as part of this bridge project but then if you look around you’ll see that at least 75% of footbridges, bridges and other structures in Warsaw are in the same condition. They only ever get treatment when they are about 10 minutes from total collapse!

The Wisłostrada picture shows just how much care and attention is paid to making the works in the middle of a busy highway safe, visible and tidy – i.e. very little! I’m constantly amazed at how relaxed the attitude is to this. We’ve even had gangs of workers with strimmers wandering all over the central reservation cutting the grass recently while the ‘fast lane’ remained open the whole time. I’m amazed there have not been more accidents.

I’ll try to find my way down to the riverside next time and see what’s going on down there.

“Hands up all the children who have a tornister.”

Sorry for gap in posting but read this and you’ll realise it’s been a tough week!

Zosia started “proper” school on 1st September and at the moment we’re all wishing she hadn’t! For the last three years Zosia has been attending play-school / pre-school and we now realise what a holiday camp that was. Start & finish times were fairly relaxed and there wasn’t much to worry about other than dropping her off, letting her have some fun and then picking her up.

When it comes to proper school though, the amount of faffing around required before she even gets there is quite amazing even though she’s only in ‘zerówka’, the year between play-school and really proper school. M has been fantastic in making sure that Zosia is replete with about a hundred items ranging from hats for swimming to pencil sharpeners, books, pencils, glue and so on. All these things need to be kept in something in the classroom so a hunt for suitably sized boxes was undertaken that took in almost every shop in Warsaw. In fact, if you combine the box hunt with the ’sticky plastic to protect books with’ hunt, it involved more man hours than Scott’s two trips to the Antarctic.

Of course, storage in the classroom is fine but you also have to do a lot more transporting to and from school, which sparked “The Great Tornister Hunt” that lasted most of our holiday (there is not a shop in Italy that sells backpack-like things that we have not been into) and into our first few days back in Warsaw. Eventually we found a shop on Mokotowska selling imported German ones, not cheap mind you. In case you’re ignorant like what I was – a tornister, wonderful word straight from the German, is essentially a stiff backpack, best demonstrated with a picture:

A gaggle of tornisters

Even the small ones are quite big for a six year old so in the end we bought a backpack for now and a tornister for next year or whenever the emergency deployment of a tornister might be required. They do look to be useful floatation devices in fact so it may become standard equipment for boat trips as well.

Equipment sorted we started worrying about getting her there on time. School starts at 08:00 and as we live about 5 mins from school I was gearing up to leave at 07:50 and all is well. Then we had the ‘parent’s meeting’ with Pani Teacher who kept saying ‘dobrze?!’ after she’d imparted some knowledge like she was expecting us to answer “Jawohl, Herr Kommandant!!“. One of her pearls of wisdom was that she expects the kids to be ready in the holding pen downstairs at precisely 07:50 so she can collect them and take them up to class. Any kids not in the holding pen at this time will have to hang around down there until a break when the lazy ones will be granted access. This brought howls of very confusing complaint from one parent, with some support from other Łomiankiites,  who appeared to blaming the teacher for the fact that Łomianki, where they live, is a long way from Młociny, where the school is and the traffic between the two is awful and takes 50 minutes driving time. This logic was being used as a lever to shift the drop time from 07:50 to 08:15 or thereabouts. Pani Kommandant wasn’t impressed, who would be? She avoided making observations about parental decisions on where to live and which schools to choose, more than I would have done, and re-stated her 07:50 rule. So, by the time you factor in the 07:50 rule, the busy traffic around the school at last-minute-drop-time, the waking up of tired children, the washing, dressing, breakfast & packing the backpack, my 07:50 leaving home is now more like 07:25 and the alarm is set for 06:30. Bloody nightmare!

The whole ‘getting kids to school’ thing is brand new for our family and is clearly something we’re going need time to adjust to. My respect for families with multiple school-age kids grows ever stronger.

Aside from the teacher’s apparent inability to switch between child and adult communication modes, there were a few other things that struck me during the parent’s meeting. Perhaps worth explaining the type of school first. The school is a “Społeczna Szkoła Podstawowa”, which as I understand it is somewhere between a public school (essentially free) and a full-blown (and usually very expensive) private school. It might be called in English a “Cooperative, almost non-profit, private school”. The costs of such schools vary but to give you an idea of the difference in costs I can compare what we are paying versus fees for ‘The British School in Warsaw’ as published on their website. Making some allowances for extra-curricular activities as yet unknown, Zosia’s annual fees will amount to roughly 9,000 PLN. The basic annual cost of The British School is 50,950 PLN. The annual cost of Zosia’s play-school was about 15,000 PLN. Some big differences there! So, on the basis that it is good, cheap, very close to home and populated by a number of people we already know, we decided to go the społeczny route.

One of the consequences of the low cost cooperative system became clear in the parent’s meeting. There were a few items of capital expense that arose during the discussion because although the classroom has all the basic essentials, and I mean basic, there are a few things missing. A water dispenser was talked about in response to the teacher’s reluctance to allow kids to go downstairs to the tuck shop to buy water if they need a drink and the parent’s reluctance to put two bottles of water in the backpack. There’s nowhere near enough shelving or cupboard space to house all the big boxes of kit and there’s no CD player to provide music or to play the discs that came with the books we bought. My simple logic assumed these should be provided by the school but to my surprise there ensued a debate amongst the parents as to the best way that we could provide these items, at our cost. As this involves a committee I have no doubt we will still be debating it at the end of the school year.

The last thing to surprise me, although it shouldn’t after all this time, was the use of the generic word ‘religion’ to mean specifically Catholicism. This relates to the extra-curricular class on ‘religious studies’. This is not a strongly religious school, a good thing in my opinion, but classes are available as an option albeit that the only options are Catholicism or nothing! As the kommandant was banging on about ‘religia’ assuming it is blindingly obvious that this means Catholicism I had to fight pretty hard not to put my hand up and ask which religion she was talking about. This surely has to change at some point even if only to satisfy a boring EU law about discrimination. If they are going to provide religious education then it should contain about 50% on the religion of the country or school and the remaining time on the other religions of the world. That would be education. As it stands today though, it is called religious education but is in fact Catholic indoctrination. Trade descriptions act maybe? Even if the school doesn’t bring religious education into the C21st the parents may force a rethink. I don’t have the figures but there is a surprising number of children who have been opted out of ‘religia’.

Continuing the health theme, let’s look at dentists.

I’m not a big fan of dentists, which means I don’t go as often as I should, which means that when I do go there’s plenty that needs fixing. That results in a lot of appointments, a lot of stress and high expenditure over a short period, which then just reinforces my feeling that dentists are an overpaid nuisance to be avoided as much as possible. And so the cycle continues.

Come on in little boy, don’t be scared – Bwahahaha!!

In my youth in the UK, dentists were not much more than hole-fillers and tooth-pullers, at least the ones I went to were. There was little time spent on giving you a “healthy smile”, it was just a case of digging a bloody great hole where it was hurting and slapping a truck-load of amalgam (a paste of silver, tin, copper, zinc & mercury) in there. None of this was done with a particularly calming bedside manner and the equipment being used was considerably behind what is available today. Just comparing the fillings I had recently versus 30 years ago;

• Today there’s a numbing gel applied to the gum before the injection of anesthetic. Before, you were lucky to get an injection at all and if you did it was using equipment borrowed from a stud-farm. The anesthetic took far too long to actually work meaning that the dentist usually got started before it had taken effect. This meant that during the treatment you were only partly numb but hours later your face was completely paralyzed! As I had at least 6 injections on the visit last week I’m pretty happy about these improvements.
• I have recollections of an awful lot of rumbling in my mouth in the old days. They had the high-pitched sharp drill to get things started but then they seemed to spend much longer with a bigger ‘grinding’ drill that made your whole head shake. I think these were scale-models of tools used to dig the channel tunnel but I could be wrong. Today the drilling seems far more efficient, less grinding and is over much quicker.
• The old dentists used to like filling your mouth with cotton-wool sausages, to keep things dry I suppose? Today there’s little evidence of these things. They weren’t painful at all but they did add considerable bulk to to all the stuff they were trying to fit in your mouth and after every last drop of moisture had been sucked from your oral cavity it did get a little uncomfortable.
• One of my most hated tools was the metal clamps they would force around your tooth to create a barrier for the filling material. They would cut your gums on the way in and out and they’d make sure you caught your lip in the screw mechanism as they were tightening it. Because of the time it took the amalgam to harden you’d be sat with this tool sticking out like a Dalek’s ray gun for ages. These days the use of these clamps is very limited and filling materials have progressed significantly. The time for fillings to harden is considerably reduced by the new materials and use of these UV lights that, one assumes, help the filling material to set. Or are they just disco lights for mouth bacteria?
• On the other hand – in the old days, dentists were cheap whereas nowadays they are damned expensive!

From memory, the concept of expensive dentistry started in the UK sometime in the late 80’s. Until that point pretty much all dental work was done on the NHS (ZUS) for free or for very small charges and private dentistry, if it existed at all, was rare. It might be fair to say that at this time the industry was essentially ‘nationalised’ leading to long waiting lists, poor service and disenchanted dentists. There was little incentive for it to be any other way. The incentive needed was loads of moolah and so all the dentists got together and decided to act as a cartel gradually weening people off NHS dentists and onto private ones charging 100 squid an hour or so. If the plebs had no choice then it didn’t really matter how much they complained, did it. The plan was put into action and now, after many years of whingeing, the general public are used to the idea that any trip to the dentist is also going to involve the taking out of a large loan. By way of evidence, on Sky News last evening they announced that nearly 400 dentists in the UK earned more than 300,000 GBP last year (1.5 million PLN) and a further 1 in every 20 dentists earned more than 200,000 GBP (1 million PLN). The lure of truck-loads of filthy wonga has of course easily transferred to post communist Poland, where I have been paying, irregularly, for private dental work since arrival.

It was therefore with a sense of trepidation that I listened to my new Warsaw dentist last week explaining just how much work I needed to have done. Anticipating this, my answer to their question of “Is there anything you know of that needs doing” when I called to book my first appointment was “All you need to know is that to a dentist, my mouth is like looking into a gold mine!”.

And this one here, well, that’s at least 5,000 PLN.

Sure enough, if you add up everything that’s recommended we’re probably talking about 10,000 PLN, maybe more. That includes an assortment of replacement fillings or crowns, a few new fillings, one extraction and an implant. None of this work is what I would call “cosmetic”, even the implant is more a case of structural reorganisation than filling an unsightly hole. So far I’ve spent about 500 PLN for the inspection, x-ray and hygiene visit plus another 750 PLN for the extraction and three fillings. These are big figures for me to consider paying and are probably unimaginable for anyone on an average wage. Still, it is cheaper than having the same work done in the UK. I checked costs of implants on various UK dentist’s websites and it looks like what will cost me circa 5,000 PLN here would be costing between 7,500-10,000 in the UK.

The inescapable truth is that dental work is going to be expensive and, depending on how you feel about dentists generally, an uncomfortable experience. All the more reason then to concentrate on the things that do vary such as quality of advice, chairside manner, skill in executing the work, environment & equipment. In these matters, I must say I am so far very pleased with my new dentists, Dent-a-Medical. I’ll admit to being quite skeptical at first. The place looks a bit too “designer” for my liking and I was worried that they would be concentrating more on the choice of magazines in the waiting room than on the dental work but I have been proved wrong. With both Marta and myself they have provided good advice on treatments, in some cases saving money and in others costing more but never without a sound reason behind the recommendation. The work is carried out very professionally indeed and most important of all, you feel like you can trust them. On top of all this their prices, although not cheap, are certainly not unreasonable.

I do wonder about how the business is organised though. Even on the web-site they have tabs for “partners” and “investors”, not what you might expect to find on a dentist’s web-site. When you think about it, the location is leased, most/all of the equipment could also be leased, the dentists are most likely self-employed and hired part time possibly only getting paid as a share of revenue coming in so the business itself might not actually extend much beyond the web-site an administrator and a marketing manager! I know the dentist and dental surgeon who have worked on my teeth so far are only there on Wednesdays, so it does make you wonder where they are the rest of the time. I’m not complaining, just intrigued at how you can build a business from almost nothing these days. If indeed my speculation is anything like correct.