Polish polish

The irregular schedule of the Condor flights flying directly from Frankfurt to Alaska gave me a day free. It was an easy choice to visit my very good friend Pawel in Warsaw. Pawel and I were classmates at the United World College in New Mexico. I arrived 6 days before Pawel and Agata’s wedding – so the timing was close but not quite perfect. They were really wonderful hosts – you’d hardly have known it was so close before the wedding apart from the dance lesson Monday night.

I didn’t have a well-formed idea of what Warsaw would be like, but it surprised me. A huge building boom is underway, fueled by EU support for infrastrucure development. Very modern ‘urban suburbs’ like the one Pawel and Agata live in seemed to be multiplying and spreading out into what was pastural land around the city. From their place, the subway was a 5 minute stroll past a high-end wine store and a roadside market. Downtown apartments are now comparable in price to those in Brussels. The ramping house prices, and labor shortage are a bit of a worry for Pav as they try to finish construction on their new house.

We went up the iconic, monumental communist palace, now called the ‘Palace of Culture and Science’ with great views of the sprawling city of green-belts, high rises, and industry, straddling the Wisla River. Warsaw is an old city, with the cathedral dating from the mid 1300s. But like much of the old town area, it was devastated in WWII. In the decade after the war, in which 6 million of their countrymen were killed, Poles flocked to Warsaw to literally and symbolically rebuild their capital and country. Its now near the end of a similar period of rebuilding post-communism – led by young professionals like Pawel and Agata who work in banking and consulting. Pav reminded me that things are still very different out in the country side though, and noted that the regulatory environment, infrastructure and development are a bit out of synch still. Nevertheless, and although I was there only for a day and two nights, Warsaw certainly struck me as a place of optimism, opportunity and promise. Above all it was just great to spend time with Pawel and Agata and to get a better feel for their life in Poland.