The power of laptop

There are many places in warsaw where you can sit outside on a sunny day. The place where I am sitting now is called "Plan B" ( yes! just like this new film out there). Plan B is a place that reminds me of torino express in Beirut. Why? Well it is a place with a kind of service that may seem unpleasant for those who are not regulars, but also because it really seems like the staff and some of the regulars are one big family. I am not a regular here, but I have been frequenting this bar since my first early visits to Poland. What makes today special is that I am sitting on a table outside. Outside means you are on a 1 square meter(roughly), and around you will be a round about. The round about is home to many trams that connect the city from south to north, east to west. We live south of here, and it is a nice walking distance on a warm day. what's more special is that its Friday, which means the day of week when you are almost certain that the week is over. Only since I am not working I have to pretend that Fridays are really special for me. It's only 5 p.m. but I am here anyway. The beer is cold, the sun is shinning and the traffic is irregular. Earlier I was watching the trams go by. It's funny when I am usually going home in one of the trams I get a few seconds to look over to where I am sitting now, but now I have much more time from where I am sitting to carefully inspect the trams. They are indeed a great invention. Just think of having to drive, or be in a car all the time to connect from A to B. Later I was looking at the sky. There were occasionally a few white clouds that hid the intensity of the sun every once in a while, but my skin stayed constantly warm which was and still is great. I am here then, but what is really special besides all the above, is that I have a lap top. So I am playing my own playlist from itunes. I am getting a kick of the music because I am the one man Dj in this square. ( off course only for myself) but hell man that is freedom. That alone can defeat the Idea of communism in a place that may have been only 20 years ago just a normal boring square with no Plan B, cafe Karma, or the many Warsaw youth on their bicycles locking them anywhere they can to gather and talk around this favorite square of mine. But I only mention communism because ironically there is a big white church to which the square " Zbawiciela" takes its name, and just down the street is "plac konstytucji"( constitution square) which was built as I understood by the russians. If you look carefully to one of the statues engraved in one of the buildings, you will see a typical socialist looking worker(Iron forger) with early decades' primitive industrial tools. In a way it will look now like a vintage revolutionary socialist poster. So the connection with torino express is a remote one since I don't know anyone here, but playing my music does make me feel like the many days and nights I stood behind the red glowing sign of torino and played for hours from bags of exhausted CDs.

PS: The picture was taken from wikipedia. The file is licensed under wikicommons.

Babie lato.

Babie lato(pronounced Babyeh-Lato) in Polish are the white puffs that come flying in the air in before the arrival of Summer. They are one of the signs that warmth has arrived, along with birds, and eventually the sunny days which so far have not been many here. However,what I wanted to talk about is in my mind clearly not an environmental subject, I rather call it a first time experience. This may sound ridiculous to people who live around here, and are used walking into clouds of Babie lato. Believe me, not all places have these beautiful things that come flying into rooms without invitation, and brushing our faces like a flirt with a complete stranger(On the fast sidewalk of distant modern life emotion, people tend to connect with the natural elements, animals, and coincidence more than with other people). In the picture you may be unable to guess right away what they are, but I will explain how it felt for me being inside of them.

For once these things from the kitchen window yesterday seemed like snow. The air blew them in all direction,and in corners they gathered forming white patches like clouds, and when the wind was favorable for a twister(small one off course) these white puffs twirled around in a funny little tornado. When I was a kid we went to our occupied village in south of Lebanon,whenever we could go there off course. Around the summer one of my favorite activities was finding these plants with the white cottony heads and blowing them with my breath, and seeing the puffs fly in all directions. Today as I walked through hundreds of them on a Warsaw side walk, I had a piece of childhood. The sentimentality in this story is worth telling for an obvious reason. I am enjoying in Warsaw whatever it is that has become exotic to me, certainly opposed to Beirut where the nearest so-called forests are far,and scarce enough not to carry any white puffs in the polluted city air. I leave you with a recommendation of a film by Federico Fellini called "Amarcord", and it starts with these white funny things, and in the film the kids declare that the winter is over.

Locked bike Kidnapped!!!!

Today I woke up to Dominika asking me where I had parked her bicycle. She seemed sad but with a little suspicious hope in her voice, like when you would know that the answer to a doubtful question is all but not a happy one, yet you still ask in case a miracle shall occur, long after miracles ceased from being all together credible ( we can't say, however, that Santa does not exist even if in a few years his home in the pole will be less white if the global warming keeps fast at work). The last time Dominika rode her bicycle was on Sunday, today is wednesday and that means it has been 3 days since we both last seen it, and I personally securely locked it to the heating pipe . We usually park it and lock it on the staircase between the 2nd and 3rd floors of our building. So my positive answer was as suspicious as any hope we both might have had, and even though I was still half asleep, I knew that the so much loved, e-bay great deal, Dominika's light green and cute and girly bike with the installable basket in the front was not on the stair case, but had been stolen who knows when, by who knows who, in the period between Sunday afternoon and wednesday morning. This was a sad wake up call by all means, and both our hearts sank in the mourning of the bike, I naturally was mad and started an investigation silently in my head to catch the thief( or thieves) and bring them to justice( whatever that means). In Warsaw like many other places,many people ride bicycles, and like many other places many eager thieves can thrive, and happily cease unwatched bicycles. Yet,how the hell can 2 bicycles disappear from inside of the building, where only residents have the key to get in and out. I say 2 bikes because there was another bicycle stolen in that same period. This brings to my mind the Italian film "bicycle thief" , although in the film the theft is almost pardonable if you follow carefully the protagonist's journey, I can't help but wonder about the person who stole the 2 bikes here. Anyway, in a sense you can't help but lose trust in locks, security, and law, when a thief must be living with you. UNFORTUNATELY THERE ARE NO PHOTOS OF THE BIKE:(

Music and grey clouds

There can be only some desperate measures to consider linking some happy tunes with grey clouds. The sun was hiding from the city of warsaw for many many many days, but finally today it shyly appeared and people rejoiced , well not literally, but you can see more flesh when the sun is out, the lush green parks are filled with white enthusiastic half naked people looking like shiny white spots from a distance, hoping to catch some tan, or stock up on some vitamin D that the sun helps provide. I am not sure what it is with the bad weather in this country but it sure does last for a long time, long enough over the decades that someone suggested that polish people would have been much nicer had they been gifted with a nicer weather( I agree, but I think of other cold dark places, and wonder if some eskimos are as rude as some polish people, because they are surrounded by snow a lot, or if some lebanese people are so friendly(mainly to tourists off course) because they are over exposed to the sunshine). However valid the debate may be,it is besides the point, the point is that I am becoming less attentive to the surrounding in cold weather, maybe with time I will change from the cheerful tourist with a camera, to a cold long faced citizen of warsaw, but until that happens I would like to find a way to keep this blog alive, since I noticed that the worst my condition in relativity to the weather, the less I tell stories of daily life in here. So what's the outcome? I am not sure, but one sure thing is that live music can sure break up cloudy weather. Just How? Well as the picture depicts, this man seen from our balcony amused us on this very grey weekend ( a few days ago) with his penetrating cheerful version of Besa me mucho. I had just come out of the shower, and the music filled the house, now I call that a good hang over treat. Hey mister accordion man play a song for warsaw.... Cheers Bob no one will sing it better:)

Mysterious Pigeons????

It's about time I spoke to those who don't live in Warsaw (like my friends in Beirut who don't have that many)about them. Yes these grey colored birds, with their particular noise(cooing) that are everywhere in Warszawa, along with the hundreds of Crows( but I will talk about the crows in the winter since they depress the shit out of me). They are "The pigeons"and, they are so many(too many perhaps) and they are not shy, or scared, and if you sit on a bench they are most likely able to approach you with their funny walk thinking that you may throw them something, so in the city they have developed a habit of being around us for obvious reasons. Yet so many seem to think that they are a real bother.For example the one you see in the picture, is one of many that land on our balcony early in the morning and coo croo(cooing cooing) until Dominika has to get up and shou them away. I was not aware of myself being uncomfortable with Pigeons since they are a kind of an attraction-where I come from, but that started to change since I moved here, many times pigeons flew right in my face and i had to duck at the very last second avoiding being (hit by a pigeon). In Lebanon people have them in cages on the roof, and they set them free several times each day to soar high above the city sky, in fact they are the only free flyers in the country and over the city(since we shot most of the birds, and have very few trees, so we ain't got no birds, or ducks, or anything better to fly above our heads, off course not counting the thousands bullets when we have any kind of celebration, or funerals, elections, football games in Kurdistan, come to think of it people shoot their guns in the air for so many reasons, it's hard to keep track). If you were to watch Beirut from far off, you would see different flocks of pigeons in different sides over the buildings going in circles. People who raise them hope to score,each time they fly, one new pigeon (female) from neighboring flying pigeons. The reason is the owners will buy a good looking male pigeon that has a certain qualities that make the other flying female pigeons from rivaling neighborhood follow him to his owners cage, and therefore gaining a free pigeon(off course easier said then done, since chances are not always good since both sides are trying the same thing). And there are these little wars all the time between the pigeon raisers, where the ones who lost a pigeon often will try to recover it by same method, or just showing up at the door where they know their pigeon is. One more thing that is silly I think is a certain Law in Lebanon that forbids pigeon raisers from witnessing in court for a crime, because they are always looking up, and the argument is that they could not have seen the crime. So anyhow, the pigeons in Warsaw are like in other places just grey and are out to eat, shit, and reproduce every chance they get and they sure are not locked in cages on the roofs of bulidings. I made a little research and would like to share this link with ( http://ehrweb.aaas.org/ehr/parents/Pigeons!.html ) you that will show us that what's known about pigeons is little and apparently these "mysterious" birds because of their abundance in the cities scientists have studied them less than other bird species (Ps. I am not sure how old the information on the link are). So in case you are fed up with the cooing you may look up this link and see what good these pigeons are good for, or just to learn some information about them. One info I can share is that " They have only 37 taste buds, while you have 9,000".

Po Polsku.

Yesterday I had my first real conversation in Polish.

Well maybe not in real Polish, but I used all the words I know and somehow it worked. I was waiting for a tram, and there was an old lady sitting there at the tram stop. She started talking to me and from what I gathered was that she was asking if I can check the tram schedule for her, I noticed she used a cane and I did not reply for the fear of exposing my bad Polish. It was a Sunday so trams don't run frequently.As I started looking at the schedule hanging on the display of the tram stop booth, I began thinking of my dilemma "how the hell do I tell the lady the actual time of the next tram in Polish" (by the way numbers are so far very hard to pronounce and memorized for me), "and even worst" I thought "how do I ask which tram she wanted to take because there were three of them?". So I submitted to failure and told the lady that I really didn't speak Polish sufficiently to help her (which luckily is a sentence you lear in language school, I think to save you from making a fool of yourself). She seemed a bit disappointed but she asked where I am from, and to my surprise remembering my classes well, I understood and answered her, and then my broken conversation started, she would asked a long question, and I would reply with very few words, eventually I was able to understand that she was waiting for number 18, and I said that it is coming TERAZ(which means NOW in Polish). The tram soon arrived and the lady got up, and before hoping in she said "Do widzenia" which is a Polish way of saying goodbye and it literally translates to " see you later". So I guess for the first time I noticed that this Language that used to sound very strange a month ago, is becoming more and more familiar. I won't get ahead of myself, but I am encouraged to start finally ordering my HERBATA(TEA) in Polish.

URBANISMOS!!!!

Around each corner we may find a happy picture in a sad moment,a great moment in a weird corner. Warsaw connects with buses, trams and one tube(subway) line. People seem, like in other big URBANISMOS(or cities), very focused on getting to where ever they are heading without looking left or right. I hate the rush. Sometimes I am late for my Polish class and I feel just like a machine, I function like one. My route becomes a series of making my way in the dark, or sniffing my pace in the wood like a bloodhound, at one point as a photographer I hate it, I feel like a sponge in the middle of the mad 5 p.m. rush hour. Because our job as photographers,I think, is to be very distant and engaged at once, but not trapped with the same rhythm, so I tell myself that the driving force in the human nature has to be a one way street to the center of an infinite circular repetitious daily life. So Warsaw's daily life can be like New York, or Delhi for all I care. That is off course looking from inside the transportation web. The life of people here have all the stories that have been shaping human existence for centuries, the times might have changed, but the emotions remain. Those annoying teens, lovers, bums, grandmas, corporate,aristocrats,beggars,losers,winners,sex in the city,artists,thieves,merchants,stores,sellers,brands,chains,McDonald,coffee heaven,corner-shops,dairy products,fresh veggies,tulips,soda can collectors,drunks,junkies,skate borders,and nerds, all the walks of life can be found here. I decided to tell from now on stories on this blog and also some observations , that can reveal a bit of the average situational comedy or disaster in the daily life of people or just mine. Like once I was in the tube and a guy eating a huge Kebab sandwich(Kebab places are very popular, cheap and common in Poland) he was standing up near the subway door, devouring the kebab like a beast, then a piece of meat comes out his sandwich and lands on a guy sitting on a bench next to him, the sitting man looked up thinking it was raining kebab, then realized that cheap lunch in public places can be shared:). Now I leave the photo this time to your imagination. That was funny. YOU GOTTA LOVE URBANISMOS(THE ART OF LIVING IN THE BIG URBANISMO).