So long Poland

WHAT'S the best thing about leaving Warsaw?

The flavoured vodka in the Qatar business class lounge, that's what.

And we had just enough time today, after a short shop and long lunch at a restaurant with a great view of the city, to enjoy the facilities before piling into the aircraft and heading back to Doha.

I couldn't pick the actual flavours, but a shot certainly warmed my toes quickly after we slogged through the snow to get to the terminal. 

The weather caved in before our departure, with a blizzard settling on the Polish capital, and the pilot had to taxi to the far end of the tarmac to have the flight surfaces de-iced before we could rumble down the runway.

I was expecting a bumpy departure, but the cloud was close to the ground and the little Airbus I was riding punched through the white fluffy stuff before the pilot even had time to lift the wheels.

So it was a smooth flight all the way to Qatar, and that's just the way we like it.

@ Warsaw, by night

Stalin's building

JOSEPH Stalin had some strange ideas when it came to giving gifts.

Instead of providing his loyal subjects – by that I mean the residents of the Soviet states he intimidated into submission – things they could use like an endless supply of toilet paper or semi-regular deliveries of fresh meet, he gave them buildings.

And by buildings I don’t mean useful structures like hospitals or supermarkets, but menacing monstrosities to be used by good communists engaged in the tasks associated with promoting communism.

Poland was the recipient of one of these monumental developments with the Palace of Culture and Science – called Peking by the Polish because the name is abbreviated to PKiN – built in the heart of Warsaw in the 1950s.

The handsome structure, which blends Baroque and Gothic architectural features and was put up using the techniques American engineers developed to rise the above the ground during the middle of last century, was home to meeting halls and ballrooms.

But the main space is the impressive theatre, with a big light feature in the middle of the ceiling that reminded me of the one in Vienna's opera house, and one of the most famous acts to play there were the Rolling Stones when they were the first capitalist band to tour behind the Iron Curtain in 1967.

Kiev, Riga and Prague were three other Stalinist cities to receive a similar gift from the Soviet’s big boss – ironically, two have since been converted into luxury hotels – and the Warsaw monument took three years to build with more than 3500 workers from around the USSR working on the project.

"Work started on May 2, 1952, and was completely finished by July 1955," my guided noted during a tour of the iconic Warsaw structure this morning.

"In 1951 Stalin decided to make gift for us, for the Polish nation, so this building was a gift from the Soviet nation to the Polish nation, but the Polish people participated in the gift very strongly influencing the design and using local materials in construction.

"More than 1400 Russians worked on the building, but it was 3000 polish technicians and engineers that did most important work.

"Before Poland was transformed in the 1990s this building was used for political purposes, but now it’s a gall for concerts and conferences."

Stalin also built seven similar towers in Moscow between 1947 and 1953 with Muscovites calling this collection the "seven sisters", or Stalinskie Vysotki which means Stalin’s skyscrapers.

During my visit this morning I found that, while an enormous amount of conservation work is being done to maintain the Warsaw symbol, nothing has been updated or changed since the days when the heads of Communism would gather in its halls to pat each other on the back and enjoy the perks of megalomania.

The faded green curtains hanging in the meeting rooms are original, the red velvet seats in the grand theatre have been accommodating Polish bottoms since the 1950s, and the faux marble columns in the ballrooms haven’t been touched since the first coat of paint was applied by the builders.

My guide said that would change in 2013, with the seats in the theatre set to be replaced because they were so uncomfortable it deterred many conference and concert organisers booking the space as modern audiences had trouble sitting in one place for any length of time.

When communism collapsed in the early 1990s there was a local movement to demolish the Palace of Culture and Science, because it represented an era of oppression the Poles were keen to forget, but it was left standing beside the city's main drag as it was considered to be such an important part of Polish history.

Walking through this building today was like stepping back in time, and I loved seeing the vintage fixture and fittings in a building that’s an elegant living-and-breathing example of Soviet decay.

@ Winter in Warsaw

Being the first

I'M visiting Warsaw for two days after Qatar Airways extended an invitation to be one of the lucky passengers to fly from Doha on the airline's inaugural flight to the Polish capital.

There were no celebratory spray of water to meet us at the airport - the fire trucks were asked to stay away, because the temperature was hovering around zero and the pilots didn't want the wings icing up when they had to turn around and fly back to the Middle East - but there was a gaggle of media waiting on the runway.

And, from my comfortable business-class seat on the warm A-320 where I had passed the time since leaving Doha watching a new-release movie, I was pleased to be covering the event from the inside rather than out on that windswept patch of tarmac where everyone seemed to be dressed in thier warmest winter coats.

Five hours flying

WHAT a difference five hours makes.

Today that was the time it took me to get from the Middle East to central Europe, with the weather shifting more than 30C from warm and sunny to wintry and white.

I started that flight in Doha, on the shores of the Persian Gulf, where the morning was clear and it was hard to see where the water finished and the sky started as the Qatar Airways I was travelling in climbed out of the city’s busy airport and away to Warsaw.

Poland is in the grip of a cold snap, with several centimetres of snow falling in the past few days, and the landscape below was a monotone of white and black as we broke out of the cloud and descended towards the runway.

The temperature hovered around zero in Warsaw this afternoon - fortunately I didn't have to leave the hotel with a long lunch put on by my hosts at the Hyatt Regency Warsaw - but it’s tipped to get a whole lot colder during the next couple of days as the front that just snap-froze German moves this way.

And, just in case you didn't figure it our for yourself, the two pictures at the top of the post show just how dramatic the change was between taking off in Qatar and landing in Poland with the heat haze of the Persian Gulf shown in the photo on the left and the cold of central Europe in the snap on the right.