Like other increasingly swollen men of advancing age, my recent Grand Tour has come to an end… for now.i You can read my somewhat obdurate or perhaps just oblique poeticisms from the first few weeks here, here, and here but I’ll take an opportunity this week to insert a few more prosaic, if still colourful, reflections that didn’t have a proper home previously. At 4`000 words, it’s not so brief, but without further ado, for your enlightenment and entertainment:
Warsaw, Poland
– Maybe when you’re hungry, the first bite just tastes the best even if it’s just slightly above average? But I had reasonably elevated expectations for Poland and first impressions did NOT disappoint. The capital city of this last bastion of christian and ethnically native european nationalism felt so “normal” that I had to pinch myself to remember how abnormal it really was
– Architecturally, it’s a rounded three-course meal, with an attractive blend of historical layers. The dominant germanic neoclassical layer was obviously rebuilt in the late 1940s and 1950s after the devastation of WWII that saw nearly 90% of the city flattened (like Dresden), but the refreshed and revamped Old Town is today elegantly proportioned along the west bank of the Vistula river, maintaining eminent walkability during the day and energetic nightlife in the evenings. The Soviet-era “Palace of Culture and Science” looms large like a Stalinesque birthday cake (exactly like Riga’s), and is worth taking the elevator to the top of, even on a breezy spring day because it’s relatively cheap, like the rest of the country, and relatively picturesque, also like the rest of the country. Beyond the birthday cake are a host of unremarkable glass-boxed tokens of post-Soviet EU integration, including a cheaply stilted Libeskind condo tower, which seems to lack balconies as a kind of reparations.
– As a family-friendly destination, there’s lots of playgrounds with soccer pitches and outdoor gym equipment. The city is also very bikeable/scooterable, which we took full advantage of
– It’s a surprisingly “male-coded” city, which you can tell by the numbers of “the lads” who fly in from UK for the weekend to live it up, just the way they did in the Baltics a decade ago, as well as the number of times we witnessed young scantily clad girls in their late teens posing at the playground for what can only be presumed to be their personal OnlyFans photographers. Distracting to say the least!
– Warsaw in particular but Poland in general is not a service-oriented country, so don’t expect deference or even much notice from wait staff. If that’s what turns your crank, try Abu Dhabi instead
– Food and accommodations are exceedingly affordable given the quality, approx. half of the prices in Germany. We would gladly stay at the Chopin Hotel again. Beds were too firm but it has a fantastic location and generous apartments for the 5 of us (myself, my two children, plus my two parents, with The Girl set to join us later on the Côte d’Azur)
– There’s even a healthy automotive scene here, with plenty of exotic metal on the streets befitting a rising industrial capital. I even took a Saturday morning to attend the local Porsche dealer Cars & Coffee event, which is the kind of thing I’d typically rather wait in line for ice creamii than go to such a thing in North America, but it made sense to investigate from an anthropological lens here, and sure enough I learned something, viz. that the owner demographic for later models skews a solid 10-20 years younger than I’m used to seeing in my parochial little corner of Canada. The number of boosters in front passenger seats, occupied by soothered infants in many cases, was orders of magnitude greater than I’d seen elsewhere in the world. As to the “coolness” (ie. fittedness) of the models themselves in this particular environs, air-cooled cars still just look like old rust-buckets to me, 996 still looks tired in anything that isn’t a GT3 / RS body kit, 991 911R and 992 S/T still aren’t cool even in Poland, but 992 GT3 on Nankangs and 992 GT3 RS in wild colours are still quite cool here, as in most other places it seems
– POLIN Museum (1000 year history of Jews in Poland), covered a generally prosperous millennium for our people in the country, and overall the storytelling was substantially better than expected here, including kid-friendly audioguides and engaging exhibit designs that kept our young men engaged for 5x longer than any other museum we dragged them to
– Julie Mehrutu is unfortunately overrated in-person, at least based upon her sizeable exhibition at the Warsaw MOCA. Some of her larger and more architectonic works from 15 years ago felt fresh and creative, like living inside a tornado, but whatever slop she’s producing since then feels about as exciting as Genoa on a rainy day (you’ll get the reference by the end of this article). The building itself, designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners (of Glenstone fame) is equally underwhelming from the outside and as easy as a highway gas station to drive past without noticing, but inside it must be said that it’s beautifully illuminated, proportioned, and detailed
– The E. Wedel chocolate factory and museum was good fun with the kids (we decorated our own giant cookie wafers, which were delicious to boot), and also visited the charming Centrum Praskie Koneser with its “reimagined” buildings complex including giant outdoor chess boards, but otherwise we didn’t explore much of the Praga neighbourhood east of the river. I’m sure there’s much more there
– Overall Warsaw probably felt like Munich or Hamburg did in the 1960-70s, which is to say energetic, organised, clean, safe, ethnically unpolluted, and bloody civilised. The weather wasn’t great: super windy, overcast, and quite cool (8-14C), but the city still shone warmly and brightly. That says a lot
– 9/10 (would readily go back and heartily recommend)
Krakow, Poland
– When people say that “Europe is turning into a museum” this is exactly what they’re describing: an Old City that’s frozen in time several centuries ago, lined with cobblestone streets with too many tourists being funnelled between too many shitty shops hawking junk nobody needs
– Much less of a city occupied by locals and worse for it
– The old Jewish quarter is somewhat interesting but is mostly a tourist trap with overpriced restaurants. Many north american yids come here on their way to or from Auschwitz and the sheep shearing machine is built accordingly.iii
– Perhaps the best cigar bar in the country is located on the rooftop of the late Soviet era Panorama Forum hotel (view from which is above), overlooking the winding Vistula river and gravitic Wawel Castle. We went three times in five days. The middle-aged owner was engaging and supremely knowledgeable – having spent 15 years smuggling cigars from Poland into Ireland and arbitraging his way to a collection of over 30,000 cigars – and was even genteel enough to allow our 8-year-old son to join my father and I for company after dinner in the adjoining restaurant. My father and I chatted, the Little Athenian played chess on my phone. It was delightful
– The centrally located soccer fields were concentrated in a single park beneath the shadow of Wawel Castle. Three pitches infield of a running track were well-used by local kids after school and no one made a fuss that we just walked in and made ourselves at home. It wasn’t hard to find other kids to play with either
– The Shingeru Ban exhibition at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology was excellent and full of bright-eyed students absorbing the structural refinement as much as the social conscience
– The major football stadium hosted the UEFA Conference Semi-Final between a Ukrainian team and a British team while we were in town, so we went to check it out. French Ligue 1 this was not. Terrible food service (Japanese baseball games are the gold standard here) and no… bloody… booze! WTFBBQsauce kinda shit is that. Apparently it was a “high risk” game, which ended up being a euphemism for boring. We left after half.
– The nearby salt mines were raved about by everyone and anyone but it’s bloody claustrophobic 100m underground and a 1-hour tour would’ve more than sufficed. Instead they drag it out into an utterly exhausting 2.5 hours. Can’t really recommend it.
– 7/10 (in no particular hurry to go back)
Nice / Villefranche-sur-Mer / Antibes / Eze / Côte d’Azur, France
– The moderate weather followed us to the French Riviera,iv but at least I didn’t have to wear my toque anymore, as I did for much of Poland. Still, it was unseasonably drizzly and grey for half of our week there, and more like 15-20C rather than 25C+
– Simply stunning surrounds, with azure waters to lose hours staring at
– Picasso Museum in Antibes is absolutely worth a visit. It’s magical to see the optimism of a 65-year-old man with a 24-year-old pregnant girlfriend, situated in one of the most romantic and naturally scenic places in the world this side of Maui, and have it all come spilling out with such impish humour and loinful vitality onto the canvas
– Chagall Museum also worth a brief visit, Matisse Museum isn’t. Both are in Nice proper
– Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild gardens in Jean-Cap-Ferrat is overrated. They’re poorly maintained and generally falling apart, though to be fair the woman who commissioned them in the first place was fairly unimaginative and notably childless so there’s probably not much legacy to preserve. She could’ve been collecting Matisse but instead collected Sèvres. It’s what it is. Wealth comes and goes. Not all branches of a tree bear fruit, no matter how noble the family
– Very hilly region overall, with habitations carved and wedged into the rock cliffs. The resulting hiking trails are abundant, so less able-bodied folks will find even the urban terrains to be a workout. We were pleased to discover the nearby “Chemin de Nietzsche” but it was rockier and less well maintained than we might’ve expected (had we been the types to expect things of pleasant surprises). On my own, it’s an athletic 30 minutes up and 20 minutes down, but with strong but cardiovascularly constrained 70-year-old mothers in tow, figure on 2-3x that each way. Solo, ripping past slower groups of travellers who were wearing all manner of inappropriate footwear from flip-flops to fashion shoes, listening to the John Lee-narrated audiobook of Thus Spake Zarathustra is *chefs kiss* brilliant, particularly if you plan on leaving one of your shoelaces untied and taking a massive shunt on the sticky sharp downhill rocks, nearly breaking both kneecaps and both palms of your hands as you lie motionless, velcro’d on the ground, the undigested margherita pizza you enjoyed at the top sliding back towards your mouth while your abdominals seize in inverted protest. In the background you might even hear the approaching voices of the sure-to-be-judgemental travellers you just whizzed past and left for dead, while you yourself now look ironically and for all the world like a sweat-glistened corpse, the one remaining earbud still connected to your dusty lobe confidently glorifying the divine virtues of earthly pain and suffering at 1.2x speed. But don’t worry, you’ll get to practice your stoic / maternal labour breathing as the shock wears off, the adrenaline subsides, and you cobble your way down the rest of the mountain, hop into your oversized Mercedes Vito van, and drive 30 minutes to the airport to pick up your beloved, who will herself be jetlagged and expecting to see a refreshed Rivieran, but instead be welcomed to the family trip by your dishevelled, hobbling ass. Just ask me how I know.
– 9/10 (would absolutely go again)
Monte Carlo, Principality of Monaco
– Postcard pretty but also gallingly glib in a way unfettered capitalism increasingly seems to me to be.v The whole place feels exactly like an airport duty free shop – commercial and contrived – not made for growth of human life but rather where human life goes to expend itself ; where mirthless capital goes to “get an edge” in the store window, the infinity pool of framed desire
– Top Marques Monaco was on while I was there so went to check it out for one of the “VIP” days. Worth it to see some rare metal in-person with basically zero crowds. Most unexpectedly underwhelming design was the new Bugatti Tourbillon,vi which just looks even more overwrought and fussy than the nearby Valkyrie and only serves to make Veyrons look like bigger bargain at ~half the price.
– Around town the only cars that “fit” this hugely perverse environs were the F40 and 2CV. Nothing before, between, or since. Everything else just looked like it was trying too hard, except perhaps the new Brabus SL Shoe Carvii parked out front of Top Marques in exposed merlot carbon fibre. I mean if you’re going to stand out…
– 7/10 (no need to return anytime soon, “restricted spotter” type feeds are all the daily dose of Monaco needed, and even then 10 minutes at a go is more than plenty)
Genoa, Linguria, Italy
– Faded, industrial, grey, flat, unromantic, and covered head-to-toe in uncreative graffiti. This is what Italian urban poverty looks and feels like. While here, you’d never know you were just down the road from the French Riviera. Hell, you might as well be in Albania for all the glamour this city projects, but let’s not be too hard on Albania, I hear it’s actually lovely. Genoa is not, it just happened to be halfway between Nice and Florence by train and had a hotel that caught my eye.
– Grand Hotel Savoia is by far the prettiest, most well maintained, and well decorated hotel in the region, and exceedingly affordable at that, costing perhaps 1/3rd of what you’d pay for similarly luxe accommodations in Venice or Florence, but hey that’s supply & demand for you. I’d almost go back just to appreciate the Chinoiserie and Japonisme collections in more depth, it’s that impressive
– The city is at its liveliest (and best?) during Alpiniviii festival in early May, which we were fortunate enough to overlap with. It’s like a boy scouts reunion, if also a reminder how old of a country Italy has become. Everyone knows that Japan is an aging and dying nation with collapsing TFR and shrinking population, but Italy is basically just as old (median age 49 vs. 50 in Japan) compared to 42 in Poland, 40 in Canada, and 39 in the States.
– Van Dyck exhibition at the Doge’s Palace was strong but not enough to redeem the overall blandness of the city,ix nor was even the best pesto pasta we had in Italy enough, as enjoyed and prepared tableside at Zeffirino’s
– 6/10 (little reason to return or recommend)
Florence, Tuscany, Italy
– Historically rich, romantic, well proportioned, and elegant, if rather female-coded, which is to say the opposite of where we started a month earlier in Warsaw. Florence is all too cluttered with gaggles of American / Chinese girls running around with shopping bags IGing every bite of gelato to death on every bridge overlooking the Arno river, but of course especially the jewelry mecca of Ponte Vecchio.x The American girls we saw mostly seemed to be the spoiled rich type doing “girls trips” while the Asian girls mostly be the spoiled rich type but with dutiful boyfriends in tow to help them carry DSLR cameras and shopping bags. Plenty of older American couples in town as well, most staying for a few days in the city before going to visit the Tuscan countryside
– Even in mid-May the place is just brimming with bodies stuffing the narrow streets; you wouldn’t dare be here in July/August when the temperatures are 2x and the crowds are 5x
– In no way bikeable/scooterable city, too many insanely tight cobblestoned streets, but the core isn’t that big and is perfectly walkable
– The surrounding area, blessed with scenic verdant hills, are not blessed with Maranello-level driving roads. The roads in this region are just too wooded, too nephronal, and there’s just too much traffic on them. The 296 GTSxi I rented also proved that not all 296s are The Second Coming™, and that in fact the higher CoG of the convertible and the non-Assetto Fiorano pack spec of this particular car can absolutely turn the platform from a 911 GT3 competitor into a humble Carrera S competitor faster than you can say “molto benne grazie mille“, which is incidentally also about the extent of my spoken Italian
– The Rothkoxii exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi was adequate but not overwhelming, certainly no match for the Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition in 2024, but the best part was easily seeing some of his original sketches for the Harvard murals, in which you can actually appreciate the shading and intentionality of what so often superficially appear to be monolithic colour blocks. We didn’t get a chance to see Michaelangelo’s Laurentian Library on this trip (it has very limited opening hourS) but apparently this was also quite influential on Rothko in the 1950s, so worth checking out next time
– The Uffizi galleries were much larger and more impressive than expected, almost Louvre levels of quality and content. The Botticelli room was the most familiar and certainly a highlight, but so too was the Carlos Scarpa redesigned Primitivi Rooms at the start of the second floor. We would’ve liked to had more time with the Caravaggios in particular on the first floor, but we were tight for time to tour the Vasari Corridor, which the Medicis built to pass from their residential quarters on the south side of the Arno river to their offices on the north side, up and over the Ponte Vecchio. It’s quite the glimpse of elite isolationism, and an effective one at that
– Hotel Lungarno is about as ideal as it gets for accommodations here. Not quite Cheval Blanc Paris levels of service, furnishing, details, breakfast, or spa, but also local-fashion-house-owned (Ferragamo in this case) and probably still the best in the city, if ultimately 65% of what Chev offers as a package, for admittedly ~half of the cost
– 8.5/10 (would visit again, much more to see and do here, but wouldn’t bother with another exotic rental in this area)
Frankfurt, Germany
– Bonus day travel due to a missed flight connection. Apparently “Travel Agent Pete” is only a genius 99% of the time and is still human, and therefore books tighter connection schedules than are sometimes required, which means that “mistakes” happen
– The social media portrayals of this city are *not fake*. The Muslim demographic takeover of Germany is very real and even more disturbing and distasteful in-person. On an overcast Saturday night, the Gallusanlage and surrounding city core, including the commercial high street, is indistinguishable from Aleppo… after its recent civil war. Walking through here, you wouldn’t believe that only 60% of Frankfurt is of “migrant background” because it sure as hell feels like 90%. Und sie sprechen alle Deutsch! So they’re not completely unintegrated, but it still felt like a foreign country, much moreso than I remember Stuttgart or Munich (much less Garmisch) feeling two springs ago. The aggressive puffer-jacketed male youf dominate the streetscape of Frankfurt with head-covered women filling in any and all gaps amongst the pulsating masses of imported fleisch, and the resulting trash on the ground everywhere made this finale to our Grand Tour feel all the wiser for having started in Poland, just so as to appreciate that sweet post-communist ethnic bubble for what it is… while it is. Comparatively, Germany’s financial capital (and post-Brexit beneficiary) is doomed to darkness much sooner than any of the dozen or so other cities I’ve visited recently in Germany, France, or England. To the point that after other recent trips to the financial hubs of Dubai and Monte Carlo, I’m even starting to wonder if capitalism really is this inherently evil, and that’s what I’m reacting so viscerally and splenetically to, like when my kids accidentally smoke me in the nuts with a soccer ball and I want to grab the ball and smack them back even though I’m reeling in pain and know it wasn’t intentional. Or perhaps I’ve just been reading too much Sam Kriss lately and wondering for the first time in my adult life if there might actually be something to this whole socialism thing. I mean no one as erudite and observant as Mr. Kriss could be so completely wrong? Obviously entirely top-down state planning is retarded and ineffective, but if Poland could survive a few decades of that “medicine” and come out the other side this strong and capable, even if for just a few golden years, maybe a few more such doctor’s prescriptions would do the West some good. If the half dozen michelin restaurantsxiii we went to on this trip taught us anything, it’s that you gotta palette cleanse once in a while, y’know?
-5/10
Well that’s about all my notes for this trip. Last spring was in Japan, next spring will likely be back in Tuscany / Italy. It’s a great time of year to be away from the lingeringly bleak Canadian Prairies. Also my young boys are at such a sweet age, and my parents are still blessed with admirable health and desire to see the world with us. Trying to make the most of this golden age too…
- Jeremy, James, and Richard had a good run too. 2005-2010 was obviously peak but they managed to squeeze a little more life out of the schtick, to their credit.
- I tend to run cold so unless it’s +30C all week, I’m probably not in the mood for ice cream, and I absolutely despise queuing with a passion otherwise reserved septum-pierced purple-haired they/thems. ↩
- Funnily enough, in my reasons for wanting to visit Poland this year, the Holocaust angle wasn’t in my top 20, and actually wasn’t even in my conscious mind at all when booking flights and accommodations a few months back. Only when I mentioned the upcoming trip to a couple acquaintances before we left, when I got several inquiries about our potential side trips to concentration camps, that it even dawned on me that some people are into that kind of thing, or would even be so rearward looking as to focus on that excruciating tragedy instead of the Golden Age that Poland is currently enjoying. After all, this current period of prosperity and ethnic homogeneity will only last another decade at most before the grinding forces of plunging TFR, aging workforce, and growing debt “necessitate” ever-increasing immigration to keep the FIC ponzi afloat. And besides, if I want to reflect on the 20th century for the Jews, I’ll go to Israel to appreciate what was built and is still being built, not just what was lost, and Yad Vashem is plenty powerful enough on that score thank you very much. ↩
- Every city we visited was 27C and sunny the week after we left, of course. But hey, since when is being a rainmaker a bad thing? ↩
- See also: godless dubai… though Toronto and New York are growing on me with time and each took 5+ visits to “click” so perhaps these other financials hubs are similar? Though we shouldn’t let such potential generosities get in the way of our tidy and tastily contrarian anti-capitalist narratives. Besides, London never took multiple trips for me to appreciate and enjoy and it’s been a FIC node for centuries. London’s great. Anti-thesis discarded. ↩
- New Bug, shrug:
- New Brabus Shoe Car aka “Rocket GTS Deep Red” :
- Note the grey felt hats with black feathers typical of Alpini
- And no match for Anselm Kiefer at Venice’s Doge’s Palace. ↩
- Ponte Vecchio, fresh off its 8-year renovation completed in 2024:
- Ferrari 296 GTS in its unnatural habitat, the Tuscan hills:
- Rothko in Firenze:
- Only the 3-star Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence was particularly memorable, and even then mostly for the exquisite wine pairings and hilariously absurd number of courses. I lost track of the number of *dessert* courses, but admittedly by that point I was goodness knows how many glasses of wine in, and the jumbo 40-year port out of the 20-gallon vase from which liquid was extracted with a theatrically oversized turkey baster was just finishing me off. ↩