nowa huta

 

kathy found herself singing the Urban-Jellen Test’s Nowa Huta song yesterday while cooking… so – since the Boston Globe says ”Come visit historic Nowa Huta, where George Orwell’s dark vision of a perfect industrial metropolis was executed with stunning precision. Until, that is, the workers rose up and overthrew Big Brother” – we went today. may have been something once, but now’s just a bland appendage to krakow’s much more interesting old city center.  i spent 40 minutes looking for the large statue of v. i. lenin they had pictured on the main square map… finally came back & read the fine print – it was torn down in 1989. so all i found was broad avenues and weak coffee.

its history is interesting tho – wikipedia sez a Communist referendum was soundly defeated by the people of Kraków, a major cause of embarrassment for the Government – so – to “correct the class imbalance”, in 1949 the authorities built a satellite industrial town to attract people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to the region, such as peasants and the working class.

was interesting to walk thru a town that was 3 years younger than i am. looked like a really big really old really sterile government project for the proletariat. did have nice trees tho.

much more interesting was kathy’s pronouncement that noses and ears never stop growing – they just keep getting bigger as you get older. the average internet user seems to believe this, but the scientific studies i found tend to disagree – tho some say flesh sags so they may appear larger.  personally, i think old flux stop using their brains causing their heads to shrink while the cartilage in their ears and nose stays the same – thus appearing larger. the sad part of this is i started looking at everyone’s nose we passed – and that is not something you want to do…. odd, ugly things they are.