Warsaw, the city that survived its own death and purgatory

The sun shone brightly that day. Unusual, for Warsaw. It shone almost vehemently, a little too strong, as if making up for all those days when it hid behind the clouds. I jumped out of my seat to the bench across from me as to avoid the sun as our train pulled underground for the approach to Warsaw Central Station. A knot of nervous sadness combined with a lack of sleep and the sun to give me a horrible headache. At least it wasn't snowing. I can't stand the snow.

Warsaw Central Station is surrounded by one of those complex knots of transportation which fill modern cities unlucky enough to have been influenced by urban planners. I'm immediately overwhelmed by a mass of people walking in all directions enclosed by a triple layer of highways, trams, and bridges. I shield my eyes and walk around dumbly as Agata hunts down our bus. I'm always worthless on trips; my head always gets light and fuzzy, and my decision making ability slows to a snail's pace. Agata acts quickly but needs advice; I can never provide it fast enough, and when I do it is totally par hasard, the same as asking a magic 8-ball. We find the bus nevertheless and are off to the archives.

Stalin's Palace of Culture looms over us. The bus takes off around it. I stare. It's much nicer than I thought it would be. Imposing and hideous, true, but likable. I like it. It has character. It bleeds a history, an unusual, colorful one. Its absurdity seems to mask the sorrows of that history in a comic exageration. I wish we had more time to see it. I can't help but compare it to the unusual structure which dominates the center of Salt Lake City. Both were constructed after the dictates of a thorough and idiosyncratic ideology. Both represent ideals and allegory in a way not seen in most modern buildings. Both represent feats of engineering defying limitations of time and place. I like them and am disgusted by them in similar ways, for similar reasons.

The film studio bugs me; pretention is in the air. I nearly break down from an intellectual existential crisis but Agata helps me through it and we get some stuff done. We're off at 3 to find our host, who works in the Department of the Treasury. We break for tea at his house then set off to tour the town before dark.

I had read much about Warsaw, how it was completely destroyed, how they painstakingly rebuilt it, the historic sections exact reproductions based on old postcards and fading photographs, the rest proud manifestations of social realistic aesthetics. I had heard of how hideous it is, how its the ugliest capital in Europe.

Maybe something's wrong with me. I liked it. I loved it. The old town was lovely, charming; it feels somehow off, admittedly--perhaps its just the cognition of its recreation, perhaps its the overly-clean condition of the buildings supposed to be hundreds of years old. But rather than a threatening, agressive sort of oddness, the sort of vampiric hunt for your wallet sensation which oozes out of the recreated towns in the US such as Williamsburg or Jamestown, I felt something else entirely. I felt a sort of admiration that they rebuilt it; a snobbish laugh at the nostalgia which prompted it but a respect for an honest desire to recreate what was so painfully destroyed. It seemed honestly fake enough that I could respect it; the motivations plain enough that I could understand them.

I grew slightly frustrated with American towns. The traditional excuses for the empty, inhuman, glorified freeways and shopping malls which are most Western US downtowns rang suddenly quite hollow. Lack of history was no excuse; here was a town which started from zero in 1945 and managed to make itself, if not perfect, at least lively, interesting, and liveable. Economic considerations seem the reverse of what I believed; it was not lack of money which destroyed our downtowns, but the excess thereof, and the excessive greed in its pursuit, which destroyed all the small shops and sidewalk entertainers and made everyone move into isolated three story mansions miles away from each other.