My first post about Tea in an age plus some Art and Water
Posted: July 7, 2012 Filed under: Warsaw | Tags: 30's, apple, art, art museum, assassination, bubble, bubble tea, burst, cup, design, drink, Food, fountain, green tea, history, jelly, Matcha, milk, offended, photo, photography, Pineapple, pipe, Plac Trzech Krzyzy, Poland, politics, posters, powdered green tea, president, rainbow, refresh, refreshing, sacrilegious, spring, straw, tea, three crosses, travel, war, Warsaw, water, Zachęta Leave a comment
My first Tea post in a long time, and I’m sure some of you may find Bubble Tea Sacrilegious! But on such hot sweaty days like these it is certainly refreshing, and there is something very fun in the struggle to get each and every last bit out of the cup! For those of you not too offended by the Bubbleyness, then mine was the one on the right, and it was a Matcha Milk Tea with Apple and Pineapple bits in the bottom! Does the fact that it’s Matcha make up for any purist annoyance out there??
We also visited Zacheta, the Art Gallery, and being as it was a Thursday entry was free. On show at the minute is a collection of works and histories of the Warsaw art School, with pieces by professors and students alike. There are some great pieces, the highlight being, in my opinion, the posters from the mid 30’s. There is a great amount of Poland’s history wrapped up in this exhibition, and I would recommend it to everyone!
That was all followed up by a wander around town, quite a lot considering the heat. We found ourselves near Plac Trzech Krzyzy, or ‘Three Crosses’. There was a fountain of water spraying out onto the street from an orange pipe. We definitely didn’t need any encouragement, and dove right in to cool off. Apparently they do this on purpose on days like these to help people cool down, in the winter they set up small fire places by the Bus and Tram stops. I’m a bit worried about the waste of water, but I guess there is no denying that it is quite a good, and kind, idea.
Day 82, Warsaw, March 31st 2012
Posted: April 2, 2012 Filed under: Warsaw | Tags: active arts, akademia ruchu, archival project, art, collective, contemporary, document, drink, Empik, fall, Food, free tea, gdansk, green superior, green tea, late lunch, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Marta, of, performance, photo, photography, Poland, politics, postdocument, rain and hail, revolution, shipyards, snow, Soviet Empire, Soviet Union, spring clean, tea, the great tea scape, thegreateascape, thegreatteascape, time, transition period, travel, traveling, travelling, vacation, Warsaw, Yoko Ono, yunnan 3 Comments
Tea 82, Yunnan Green Superior, the Apartment, Warsaw
We were late leaving the flat today, as Marta decided to have a bit of a spring clean. When we did leave it was time for a late lunch, so we headed out, into the freezing cold, and SNOWING (!) air, we jumped on the metro to central and headed for Kebab King. I had a huge craving for Falafel! So we went to the large branch of Kebab King on Jerozolimpskie and basically stuffed our faces, I had Falafel, Chips and then we both shared some Baklava for dessert! (One Pistachio and one Coconut sweet treats)
We got totally stuffed and then headed back outside. Whilst we had been inside eating the sun had been out, shining through the window, but, as sod’s law so often dictates, as soon as we left the rain and hail began beating down on us. We ran around the corner, cut through Empik and then waited for a bus from Foksal. We took the bus to the stop nearest to Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, the centre for contemporary art in Warsaw. We walked briskly here, the snowy hail was pouring down on us.
The main show that is on there at the minute is a semi-retrospective / archival project about the AKADEMIA RUCHU. entitled AKADEMIA RUCHU. CITY. The FIELD of ACTION. This charts the history of one of Poland’s most prolific and active arts collectives. They began life in the mid 70’s and have created numerous performative installations in public spaces ever since. The show charts pretty much every project they have ever conducted, through photography, film and text. It was really great to discover this group, who have made, and strive to make important, thought-provoking and enlightening work for their whole existence. This section of work on show at the centre took us quite a long while to tour around, so if you plan to go, definitely give yourselves time. The show ends in a small basement space where some more of their video documentation is shown and they are running a little tea stand, with free tea or coffee and a lucky dice roll to try and win a glass of wine (sadly me, nor Marta managed to roll the correct amounts to get any wine)… We did have a cup of tea and coffee though and sat and watched some more of the videos, and spoke to the guy serving the tea, who is a member of the Akademia Ruchu. There are apparently only 5 of them left now, there were 22 originally. It seemed a little odd to discover that, as I had walked around the show thinking that Akademia Ruchu was more organic than that and that maybe they had a membership that was constantly evolving across the years. It seems a shame that one day it will cease to exist…
The other parts of the building house two more exhibitions, one part is showing POSTDOCUMENT (they seem to enjoy capital letters here…) This is a show of photographs charting the Polish Transformation following the fall of the Soviet Empire from 1989. There are some really great photographs in this show, and some really interesting works and perspectives. Really worth seeing. We could have spent much longer in the show, walking around seeing everything in more detail, but we had spent so long in the first part that we were running out of time. The next part isn’t so interesting, a collection of Cognitive artworks from the CCA collection. There are some works from Yoko Ono and a work by Magdalena Abakanowicz.
After the shows we were both ready for home, so we walked in the cold air back to the Metro, Politechnika this time, via a shop to buy some juice. Then we hopped on the train home. Back home and we just chilled out basically, drinking some more tea via Marta’s wonderful new teapot and then headed to bed.
A Travel and Tea Diary 