What's So Fascinating About Demolition?

The world over you can be guaranteed of a few things.

1. Any department store playing loud and tinny pop music does not sell good quality, reputable couture,
2. Public transport ticket inspectors in any country are douche bags, and
3. Look up in the sky long enough and before too long passers by will follow suit.

Walking along Aleja Jana Pawal II, a street in Warsaw named after Pope John Paul II, quite near one of my favourite pieces of graffiti I noticed about 8 people transfixed on something skyward.  Most of them were men, a couple of them wearing high-visibility vests, hard hats and steel capped boots.  A cyclist in Lycra had abandoned his latte, unlatched his cleats and dismounted his bike to see what all the fuss was about.  Each one of them were looking up at the sky shielding their eyes with their hand and squinting in the sun.  "What are they staring at?" I wondered and turned my head in the same direction resting my gaze upon the noisy construction site that had captured their attention.

Peering upwards I could now see that it was actually a deconstruction site.  A giant hydraulic claw was being manipulated by a little man in a big machine as the 8 stories were being reduced to dust and rubble piece by piece.  For reasons I can not pin point, it was mesmerizing.

Watching this demolition in progress and the over-sized teeth munching away like a hungry monster at the concrete and steel, I considered the life of the building.  I imagined it once housed many office workers, forced to pack their calculators, computers, pens and post-it notes into boxes and move to other locations as they were told the building was being sold and torn down to make way for a new development.  I considered the similarities between the way the building was put together and was now being pulled apart, except in reverse order.  Furniture, fixtures, lights, carpets, windows were now all gone and soon too would the concrete and the metal structure that held it together.

Many people ask me why I came to Poland.  The answer they are looking for is not 'to teach English'.  What they are really asking is of all the worldly destinations why would I specifically choose Poland?  The Poles ask because although they seem quite a patriotic bunch they also don't seem to understand why someone would leave Australia and travel so far away.  Partially because I suspect they don't believe there is anything here worth coming for.  It's not a viewpoint that I agree with frankly I see quite a bit of potential here in Poland.

Speaking with a British national last week who runs a small English language school in Warsaw he revealed he arrived twenty years ago, literally just after the fall of communism.  I can only imagine the transformations that he has witnessed and in his own words, "the place has completely changed... completely changed."  Newspapers were once-a-fortnight treat as they were too expensive and his first teaching assignment paid $4,000,000 zl per month under the old monetary system.  The new system introduced in 1995 truncated the last 4 zeros.  Apparently he had no way of knowing if that money was decent or not and eventually he found out through a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend that the money was ok.  One could live on it but one would not be able to accumulate savings nor wealth.

Today it's a completely different Poland.  For example I arrived three weeks ago without knowing a single word of Polish.  With iPhone in hand and a Polish sim card I quickly and freely became familiar with my new surroundings.  The standard of living here is quite good.  It's not perfect but, no place is perfect and that's a good thing!  It means there is room for improvement.  Development and opportunities are abound especially in a bustling city like Warsaw where a young population are eager to embrace change and make a better life for themselves, all but unaware of the previous system.  What I see when I look at the demolition of this building is the potential that lies therein as old makes way for new.  As I imagine and wonder with wide eyes what the mysterious 'new' will indeed look like, I suspect that too is what everyone else is wondering and anticipating.