(I have a personal rule of not taking photos of people based on what they're wearing, especially when it's about such a weak premise as matching clothes. But I'm sloooooowly getting better at finding stronger reasons to break this rule)
During my long May weekend in Kraków I had a rare occasion to grab a few beers with my remote teammates. We finished the evening early, but two of us decided we're not done and went for a late night walk.
Half an hour before the alcohol prohibition (yup, it's a thing in this one city in Poland!) we bought a few beers and started sipping them illegally in one of the local parks.
And guess what? Well, my teammate had a skateboard. And I had my fastest lens on my camera.
So, what happened next? Well, around 2am somewhere in the center of Kraków one IT nerd started testing his old skateboard skills. The other IT nerd sat on the ground and started stress-testing his Viltrox f/1.4 lens and an ISO setting well above 20k.
My lovely friend successfully landed a few jumps.
I missed a lot of frames because focusing late at night is hard, but a few serviceable frames happened as well.
So yeah. 90% of people will stop to look at my boring touristy snapshots and move on. I'm more excited about this spontaneous drunk session in extreme lighting conditions. 🤷
🇵🇱🤝🇦🇹 This is one of the most exciting train-services in Europe: EC 107 "Porta Moravica" with SBB🇨🇭-carriages - including a 1st class panorama car - all the way to #Przemyśl at the 🇵🇱/🇺🇦-border. We entered in #Cracow🇦🇹 travelling in the direction of #Graz🇦🇹! Amazing 😍!
The third face of Nowa Huta in Kraków, perhaps the most surprising to me, is the "natural" one.
It takes about 50 metres of detour from the usual urban area to discover a huge grassy meadow, often frequented by locals to sunbathe and relax. It was so calm and silent my jaw dropped and I couldn't pick it up. The only thing that reminded me I was in one of most populous parts of Kraków was that thermal power plant in the horizon.
My peanut Warsaw brain keeps yapping: how come a housing estate hasn't been built here yet?
Nowa Huta in Kraków (that industrial-ish one I guess)
The other face of Nowa Huta begins as soon as socrealism is abandoned and modernism gets to be all the rage (which is somewhere between late 1950s and 1970s I guess?). I'll be honest though: I know very little about architecture and I may have made factual errors in the previous sentence. All I know is that I'm attracted like a moth to lines, patterns and geometry.
Also, in a weird way that style evokes specific images in my head. I have some kind of synthwave-like nostalgic feelings about Poland as seen by my parents in 1970s and 1980s. All of which is of course fake because I'm not forgetting who ruled the country at that time.
Built from the ground-up as a separate city to settle workers employed in the newly built steelworks (it's even in the name, which literally means 'the new steelworks'). Designed as a poster city for Soviet propagandists. Huge, industrial, pompous. These days it's one of the most populous parts of Kraków, even though it completely didn't feel that way during my long weekend visit.
I barely scratched the surface, as severe planning mistakes were made on my end. Plus I don't like taking cliche postcard photos in harsh light. But I managed to see three different faces of this place and that counts I guess.
We start with the socrealistic face. The one that dates back to 1950s and truly feels different than whatever my peanut Warsaw brain assumed Kraków to be.
(back from Kraków with geez-how-many-gigabytes of photos and 4k30 short videos. And downloading them from my iPhone took hours, with Airdrop simply noping out at 700+ files)
rewelacyjny #d_beat#crust z Krakowa! żadnych udziwnień, czysty crustowy napierdol z mocnymi #metal wstawkami - ogień! 🔥️ no i teksty na pewno nie o łapaniu motyli 😈️