2010 Summary, 2011 Plans...

The end of the year is a good moment to review what I've done and focus on plans for the next year. So if I get back to my plans for 2010 I must say that I realized many of them and in place of failures I put new ones. Finally I visited following places:

1. Jan/Feb 2010 - Ecuador (including Galapagos) and Miami (USA)
2. Mar 2010 - studio workshop in Łódź - not recommended
3. Mar 2010 - a day in Biebrzański Park Narodowy
4. Apr/May 2010 - visit to steam engines show in Wolsztyn and Poznań area
5. Jun 2010 - very successful visit to Montenegro and Croatia
6. Jun 2010 - airshows in Góraszka and Płock
7. Jul 2010 - visit to Sandomierz and Baranów Sandomierski
8. Aug 2010 - Toruń and Bory Tucholskie event
9. Aug 2010 - family trip to Spain
10. Oct 2010 - great AXALP event and visit to Venice on the way home
11. Nov 2010 - very successful Karkonosze weekend

The other story is plan for 2011. Here's the list:
1. Jan 2010 - Biebrza winter weekend
2. Jun 2011 - Beeeaters hunting in Hungary
3. Jun 2011 - Płock Airshow
4. Jul 2011 - Alaska Expedition
5. Aug 2011 - Radom Airshow
6. Sep 2011 - Bieszczady weekend
7. Oct 2011 - AXALP 2011
8. Nov 2011 - some trip to US, maybe Florida maybe something else...

Wish me luck! And I wish you Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

I'd like to wish Marry Christmas to all of my blog readers. This time of the year is all about sharing wishes with people you care about most. So keep smiling and be good for others. I wish you lot of success, health, luck, love and everything else during this Christmas Time. Special greetings go to people I love, like my family and very close friends who spend the most of their time with me and can withstand my whims :)

Gaining altitude

Today I had a chance to see Warsaw from the height. Unfortunately weather was not good for such an exercise, but however I decided to try. Results are maybe not astonishing although I wanted to share them with you to give you a clue what is possible in Warsaw. I plan to visit this place one more time in the summer or maybe during the night? It should give much more interesting effect, but for now you have to see what I got or quit this page...Enjoy!

One bridge, but so many bridges

We have really strong winter in Warsaw this year (yeah, global warming, mhm...). There's about -10C degrees. Although I decided to take my friend and go and take some pictures of the bridge. It has recently received some nice illumination and is not so boring anymore! Colors are changing all the time, so you can see what I got from today's session...


I noticed that river looks interesting due to the flowing ice flows. I was trying to show the speed of the river below :)

SLOW

FASTER

REALLY FAST!

"Tudo É Possible" by Che Sudaka

I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but I'm a big fun of folk, pop, jazz, rock and all kind of the music sung in spanish. One of the groups I've recently discovered is Che Sudaka and I came across them because I'm also fan of Iberia Records company. They publish nice spanish language discs in Poland and almost every disc released by them is really a well chosen one (of course if you like and accept the different styles). You can be a little surprised by some songs on the discs, because they sometimes represent quite marginal styles. I've such a feature that I accept everything while in spanish, whenever it's like a wedding folk music or even similar to disco-polo. Until it's spanish, I can listen it.

Che Sudaka was officially founded on March 15 in 2002. It's the successor of the Correcaminos - Argentinian band in which two of Che Sudaka members played before. Guys started as a musicians playing in the street of Barcelona. But they quickly started to be discovered as well performing and more and more popular band. In 2003 some more guys joined the band. They started singing reggae, ska, punk, Hip-Hop and rumba music and traveling with concerts across the Europe. Since their German Tour in 2005 they give a concert almost every day! They are veeery popular and people love them! Their music is very energetic and gives you a lot motivation to live!

The group released 9 discs and you can even download free one from their webpage! Definitely recommended for crazy people like me...

"Ameryka nie Istnieje" by Wojciech Orliński

As you probably already know, I'm a little bit crazy. Crazy about USA and crazy about photography. Maybe I'm also crazy about other stuff? Who knows... One of my strange hobbies is collecting books published in Poland and in polish, but describing USA or at least being connected with this big country. Recent of them is "Ameryka nie istnieje" written by Wojciech Orliński. To make it even more crazy, I would like to say that I was working with Wojtek in one company from 1997 till 2000. I think I know this guy quite well (but he probably doesn't remember me:) and I always was fan of his articles published in "Gazeta Wyborcza". He was writing about movies, computer games and this kind of technical stuff, so it's hard not to like the guy! Now he even has a blog! But let's get back to the book...
Title is really puzzling - in english it means "America doesn't exist". And author throughout the book is trying to proof that what we know about America is only our imagination. And to some extent I agree with Wojtek. This country is different than European ones. We have a lot of virtual stuff there. But isn't virtualization something trendy nowadays? More I read it, more interesting it gets. I really recommend this book, because I like the style, I like the stories, I like America shown the way it's shown here!

Last morning in Karkonosze

During my last trip to Karkonosze in November I decided to take pictures of sunrise. The only day we had a chance to catch nice sunrise was Sunday - it means our last day in the mountains. The day before we found nice view of a church with mountains as a background. Morning was nice and we had additionally some good clouds. Of course I've taken over 100 pictures, but only two are worth showing (first was taken just before sunrise), so please enjoy them!

Wang Church from XII century

During my last trip to Lower Silesia, I've visited Karpacz. There's one nice building in the upper part of this health resort of southern Poland - Lutheran parish Wang Church in Karpacz. See how nice it is in the evening!

Lubawka Abandoned Train Station

On our trip to Lower Silesia and Karkonosze we accidentally noticed nice, old, abandoned train station in small city called Lubawka (Liebau in Schlesien). It was so interesting and so deserted that we decided to take some pictures of it and later find some stories to explain how it became such a ruin. After googleing for few minutes I've discovered that in 2008 train station building was sold to some unknown investor who promised to transfer it in 2 years into 5-star hotel. Unfortunately it's 2010 and station is exactly as it was 2 years ago - a ruin. The history of this place is even more fascinating - it turned out that station burnt down in 1991. Before that it was very important place on Czechoslovakia-Poland border and you can notice it watching the size of building. It's hard to believe but since 2007 in the summer time this station is open and on the weekends trains are coming here and departing from here! Poland is strange, but really interesting country!

Karkonosze in November #3 - Waterfalls

Next day in Karkonosze was rather rainy. Weather was awful, so we decided to focus on some local waterfalls. In the morning we got to Kamieńczyk waterfall, but taking pictures of it wasn't an easy task. Downstairs it was impossible to even unpack camera due to a lot of water falling from the top. We moved up, but there's some fence and you're not able to take pictures easily through it. I managed to rearrange my tripod to some strange construction and took the smallest lens that was able to get through the fence. Somehow I managed to take few poor quality pictures that you can see below:


Then we headed to Szklarki waterfall. Unfortunately trail was closed and we quit this idea. Thinking about some other ideas we started to follow the light on our way to Jelenia Góra and taking nice pictures on our way:


Later we headed to Karpacz and had some coffee and cake (what a joke it was! cake was 2x2 cm large and we paid 12 pln for this! Definitely not recommended!). When rain stopped a little bit, we finally arrived to Dziki Wodospad and taken some pics:


After such a tedious day we decided to take some really amazing pictures in the night. But you've to wait a little bit to see them.... :)