Office Town Near Okęcie

Okęcie Expansion?

A complex of office buildings, exhibition and conference halls are all to be built in the vicinity of Warsaw Okęcie airport at an estimated cost of PLN 10 billion. The airport authorities have just issued an invitation for tenders for the site development plan. The area in question comprises 10 hectares located next to the airport. Currently the Courtyard  Hotel is located there as well as some small buildings surrounded by parking lots and… bushes. The State Airport Authorities estimate that there will be enough space for buildings with a total surface area of 25,0000 square metres – equivalent to either two Palaces of Culture and Science or 5 Galeria Mokotów shopping centres. One of the main advantages of this area is that it is very well-connected to the city centre.
Gazeta Wyborcza

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Flat Prices Settle Down

Up or Down?

According to the analysts of the System for Analysing and Monitoring Real Estate Market (AMRON), flats in the largest cities are no longer becoming less expensive while next year prices will probably be on the increase. AMRON is an institution created by banks with the purpose of collecting data on, amongst others, prices on the real estate market. 90% of the data originates from notarial deeds both on the primary and secondary markets. On Friday, November 27, the Association of Polish Banks (ZBP) issued a report on their findings for the first time. Those who expect the prices of flats and houses to continue falling for at least another year will find the report disappointing as according to AMRON the trend has come to a halt. In the third quarter of 2009, the average price in Warsaw was PLN 7,853 per square metre, nearly 10% lower than during the peak period of the real estate boom (early 2007). During the past 6 months though, the average has only fallen by an additional 1%. The situation is similar in other major cities.
Gazeta Wyborcza

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No Big Fights For Adamek

No Takers

New Polish heavyweight hero Tomek Adamek is no longer scheduled to go up against a well-known boxer on February 6. The reason? A shortage of funds. If the much talked about showdown on February 6 at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey were a football match it would carry the status of a friendly outside of FIFA’s time frame. The main reason is that there are no major American television stations that are planning to broadcast the event, much less have it in their budgets. Ziggy Rozalski, Adamek’s promoter told Gazeta Wyborcza that Michael Grant, James Toney and Hassim Rahman have recently declined the offer to take on the Polish boxer.
Gazeta Wyborcza

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Grey World, Great Film

Great Grey Movie

Nothing here is pretty. The scenery is ugly, the people evil,  the police incompetent, the world hopeless. Only Wojciech Smarzowski’s movie turns out to be exceptional. There are no flowers, no sun rays. Open up to Poland, to its past. In Wojciech Smarzowski’s new film, the Poland in question is a country where life is incredibly difficult. Or maybe it is only the people that cannot bear to live there? It is a life of constant feuding and bickering and numbing your mind with alcohol. Waiting things out, killing time, betrayal and mud that covers everything. Despite the gloomy atmosphere there is a sense of hope that one feels while watching; at least Poles know how to make a quality film.
Metro

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Book Cemetery

The End of Books

Warsaw second-hand booksellers have raised the alarm that as many as a few hundred thousand books will soon be trashed. Help save them and take home as many as you can. On 30^th November the opening of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books (Cmentarzysko Zapomnianych Książek) will take place in the University of Warsaw Library. The Cemetery is actually a second-hand bookshop where you do not buy books but take them and give them a new home. The number of volumes exceeds 30,000. This extraordinary way of selling books is a response by Warsaw second-hand booksellers to poor readership and the situation on the ailing book market. “New titles and authors die everyday and we are witnessing this sad process,” says Waldemar Szatanek, the man behind the campaign.

There are thousands of books in second-hand bookshops which no one asks for and then there is the problem of what to do with them. “Neither customers nor libraries want them. Should we throw them out? Recycle? This is sacrilege for every bookseller and book lover,” explains Szatanek. The problem with unwanted books has been growing in the last few months. People leave whole collections of used books in second-hand bookshops “Surprisingly, the motivation behind this is not the money they get but simply the need to dispose of the books. Our customers tell us that they feel bad about throwing books away so they bring them here. Unfortunately we are the ones who have to do it because there is no room to store them. We are becoming undertakers,” says Grzegorz Cielecki, a second-hand bookseller from Warsaw. As the vast majority of booksellers in the capital experience the same problem, some of them decided to save a few hundred thousand books from being thrown out. Hence, an idea emerged to create the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The books are for free but you have to pay to enter the Cemetery. Once you are there you will receive a bag, which you can fill with as many items as you want. There are 5 crypts in the Cemetery ranging from history and poetry to fiction and entertainment. For more information on opening times and entry fees click here.
tvnwarszawa.pl

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Bielecki to Leave Pekao

Moving to Pastures New

Jan Krzysztof Bielecki is the most recognisable bank president in Poland. He was in charge of the 2nd largest commercial bank in the country (PKO SA has 5 million clients). Yesterday evening, the bank issued a communique announcing that Bielecki had resigned. He is to leave his post as president on January 11, 2010, 4 months prior to the expiration of the 6-year term of the board. Along with the presidency, he will give up the position he has held with the Italian UniCredit group, which PKO is a part of.
Gazeta Wyborcza

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Super Beth Concert

Super Hero?

The only things missing during Saturday’s concert of American group Gossip at the Palladium Club were tickets. On the other hand, great music and a crowd of fans going crazy was clearly visible. It was without question one of the best Warsaw concerts of 2009. Clad in a black, tight-fitting outfit, with flame-red hair and a rainbow-flag cape tied around her neck which she received from one of the fans, Beth Ditto of Gossip looked like a super hero straight out of a comic book. Her energy was contagious. Just a few minutes into the concert a few hundred fans were dancing, singing, jumping and going into a frenzy – numerous beer-filled plastic cups shot up into the air after Ditto’s broken Polish “Na zdrowie!” The performance started with Dimestore Diamond, a simple song off Gossip’s latest album Music for Men, released in 2009. Other songs soon followed: the bass-filled Heavy Cross, Love Long Distance, and punk soul Men in Love. Fans of older hits such as Listen Up did not have to wait long to hear their favourites. Gossip exploded onto the music scene a few years ago on a mission to prove that a star performer does not have to be anorexic or look like a walking advertisement for a plastic surgery clinic. Gossip are long-time advocates for the rights of feminists and homosexuals and firmly believe that being natural is a quality their fans have come to respect and admire. Ditto is approachable and always keen either to jump into the crowd or invite fans to join her on the stage. And when she is not singing, she talks to fans and jokes with them wanting them to enjoy her show to the fullest. The concert ended with Queen’s We Are The Champions. Ditto waved and quickly disappeared… only to return a short while after singing with fans in front of the club’s entrance. Hardly typical behaviour for a star but then Beth Ditto is a super hero and can do whatever she pleases.
Gazeta Wyborcza

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Contemporary Cavemen

Polish Research

These are the only people in the history of mankind who, after abandoning life in caves, decided after a few centuries to go back to their old way of life. It was in caves that the inhabitants of Easter Island still dwelt a few dozen years ago. On Easter Island, there are still a few living persons who, in the middle of the 20th century, were born in caves. In one of them, which for centuries had been used as a delivery room there are no beds, no hospital equipment, only a stone shelf on which a woman would lie.

Polish scientists who came to Easter Island to conduct research on the customs of the isle’s inhabitants visited this extraordinary place last year. In the 1950s Easter Islanders still lived in caves. Nowadays they often spend their weekends and holidays there, organising picnics and the like. Only a select few are available to the public for tours, most are carefully guarded against strangers as they are still used as homes. The first peoples who came to the island and settled there around 1000 A.D. used caves as protection against the strong winds and rains. They soon changed their way of life and started building wooden homes  giving up the underground areas to the dead. These were used as burial places and cemeteries, also as temples where various religious rituals were performed. In the 18th century wood supplies ran out which forced the islanders to return underground. When famine struck and some had to resort to cannibalism to survive, people once again used caves for protection. Some remained there until the 1950s.
Newsweek Polska

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Global Scrap Heap

Toxic Company

Where is your old, broken television set? You were told it would be recycled but it just might be somewhere on a pile of rubbish in India, China or Africa. Buying 87,000 tons of contaminated gasoline for a song, purifying and then selling it means that Swiss company Trafigura is looking at a $7 million profit. There is one slight problem, however, namely what to do with hundreds of tons of sulphur waste that was created during the purification process. On July 2, 2006, Probo Koala, a ship rented by Trafigura docked in Amsterdam, one of the very few cities in the world where sulphur waste is recycled. When the Dutch discovered that the cargo was far more toxic than previously declared by Trafigura, they decided to raise the fee to €1000 per cubic metre which prompted Probo Koala to quickly exit the harbour and head for the Ivory Coast. Once there, using the services of a local company, the waste was removed from the ship and then dispersed over a random area surrounding the nearby city of Abijan. Quickly thereafter, more than 100,000 people needed medical help at local hospitals. Cases of poisoning were diagnosed in over 1/3 of patients while sixteen people died. Unfortunately this is not a one-off case as rich countries not only produce more industrial waste but are eager to dispose of it and “store” it within the boundaries of their less wealthy neighbours.
Newsweek Polska

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Will Putin Visit Katyń?

Ready to Talk?

The Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is likely to accept the invitation of the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk and visit Katyń in 2010. Mr Putin will attend the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Katyń massacre commemorating the Polish officers executed by the NKVD, said Inessa Jazborovskaja, a respected historian from the Russian Academy of Sciences, claims Nezavisimaya Gazeta. According to Jazborovskaja, a member of the Polish-Russian Committee for Difficult Matters, such a gesture would be a significant step towards de-stalinising Russian foreign and internal politics. Jazborovskaja claims that the reluctance of the Russian authorities to take responsibility for Stalinist crimes is the main reason hindering the process.

When asked for a comment on the recent verdict of the Moscow Court which has ruled against Joseph Stalin’s grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili in a defamation lawsuit against Novaya Gazeta, the Memorial society and a former military attorney Anatoly Yablokov, Jazborovskaja stressed that this is the first time when the Katyń massacre was linked with the repressions of Stalin’s regime. “It allows us to assess that horrible crime based on a court verdict,” she said. Stalin’s grandson claimed that facts in the article infringed upon the honour and dignity of his grandfather and he demanded a disclaimer in the newspaper and 10 million rubles (around €234,000) in compensation. 73-year-old Dzhugashvili went to court with the lawsuit because of the article “Beria appointed guilty” published April 22 by Novaya Gazeta. According to Dzhugashvili it was offensive and unjust to call Stalin a “bloodthirsty cannibal”. The article was written by Anatoly Yablokov, who led the official military investigation of the Katyń massacre from ’90 to ’94, and the mass killings of Polish prisoners by the infamous NKVD. The article in a special edition of Novaya Gazeta was prepared together with the Memorial society, the NGO that monitors and documents crimes of Stalin’s regime.
Onet.pl

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