Europe Trip 2025 - Helsinki Airport

It's quiet, welcoming, interesting. Some sections have timber flooring.

Residents of Helsinki live among trees:

Europe Trip 2025 - Poland - First Impressions

Alcoholism, graffiti and dirt.

Landed at Chopin airport in Warsaw. Went to a toilet. A row of small empty vodka bottles (małpka -  little monkey, 100ml bottle) welcomed me to Poland. Got on a train to the city.

Got off at Rakowiec. Ugly graffiti welcomed me to Warsaw. 

Walked from the platform under Grójecka street. Vodka bottles, trash, dirt, drunks. That place looked like it had no owner, not PKP, not the city. It happens in Poland. There are buildings, plots, or sometimes just bits of squares or streets that have unresolved ownership. Still, that underpass is a shame for the Warsaw government, regardless of who owns it.

Looking at the city through a bus or tram window shows what many rose-eyed YouTube videos don't.

The red-white-green flag on the abandoned building above is Legia football club. Their graffiti is not too bad. 

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Since my first impressions were negative, let me add one more negative impression that I was left with after about 4 weeks of taking public transport in Warsaw: many drivers are bad. The management is not doing a good job training the drivers and monitoring them. I know there is a shortage, there are job ads for bus drivers running on the buses, but come on. Ok, here are the problems with some bus (and to an extent tram) drivers: 

1. They drive as if they were transporting bags of potatoes, not people: accelerating and breaking too hard, taking corners at too high speed, changing lanes too abruptly. I wonder how many people fall and get hurt every year on buses and trams in Warsaw.

2. They depart too early. Departing two minutes early is a big deal, when the next bus is in 20 minutes.

3. They don't wait for passengers. The driver that left the stop two minutes early, did not wait for me running up to the stop, but closed the doors, and then stopped after 20 meters waiting to do a left turn. The back of the bus was still practically at the bus stop, and the driver ignored me standing at the last door and frantically pressing the button.

4. They don't care if passengers lose connections. That bus driver was running a shorter route, which I did not notice (it was called the same as the longer route Z-9 I think - that's something the management messed up - it should have had a different designation). At the last regular stop, the driver did not make any announcement, but moved on, changed lanes, did a u-turn, stopped, and turned off the lights. That stop was so far from the last regular stop, that by the time I walked back, I missed my follow-on bus. Since it was a Sunday night, the next one was 60 minutes later.

Europe Trip 2025

I vowed not to fly for tourist reasons, until we have electric planes. This trip was for family reasons. My daughter wanted her husband and her daughter to meet family and asked me to accompany her. She last saw them when she was a teenager. It's good that I went. I was able to live for a couple of weeks with my mom who is getting very fragile. I was able to show a bit of Poland to my daughters and their partners. 

Before the trip I subscribed to Make Sunsets who cool the Earth by sending sulphur dioxide (SO₂) to the stratosphere using weather balloons. One gram of sulphur released in the stratosphere (20 km above the surface near the equator) counteracts, for one year, radiative forcing of one ton of carbon dioxide (CO₂) released in the troposphere. Some volcanic eruptions do that too. As a result of Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991 average global temperature dropped by 0.6 C for 15 months. I paid for 90 grams of SO₂, to counteract the warming caused by 90 tons of CO₂ for one year. My flights emitted about 7.6 tons of CO₂. Large scale Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) should already be happening as a stop-gap measure to prevent climate tipping points. The future will tell if we were smart enough to do it.

Regarding passenger electric planes, there is progress, but it is slow. The promising Swedish startup Heart Aerospace moved to California and pivoted to a hybrid (petrol/battery electric) 30 seater ES-30 with maximum range of 800 km in hybrid mode with 25 passengers and 200 km range with 30 passengers in all-electric mode - to be ready in 2029. Dutch company Elysian is much less advanced, but much more ambitious - they want to fly a 90 passenger, 800 km range, all-electric E9X in 2030.

Nobody Wants Your Sh*t by Messie Condo

Subtitle: "the art of decluttering before you die". Published 2023. Audiobook read by Hillary Huber.

Lots of swearing. Good narration. Convincing? Helpful? I guess. It's all common sense, I think. My main motivation for decluttering is reduction of mental strain. I hate mess. 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-resilient-brain/202302/the-many-mental-benefits-of-decluttering

Another is safety: swollen lithium batteries in old laptops and phones are a fire hazard. I found four! 

Another reason is privacy: not needed documents with names, birthdates and other sensitive information should be shredded or destroyed in some other way - soaking them in water and making them into a pulp is satisfying and quiet :) 

If you have old hard disks: check what's on them before disposing. If you cannot access the data anymore, destroy the device mechanically. Printers and scanners may have built-in hard disks or SSDs. Smart phones and tablets have SSDs. Be careful not to damage lithium batteries when attempting to destroy onboard SSDs - I had a Motorola phone that had the battery sealed together with the electronics.

Poland at War by Zbigniew Parafianowicz

Polish title: "Polska na wojnie".

I followed Polish-Ukrainian news closely before and during the full scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, so I knew about many of the events presented in this book, still the insider knowledge presented is very interesting and sometimes funny.

Worth reading.

The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell

"A dream, a temptation, and the longest night of the Second World War."

Published in 2021. Read by the author.

An audiobook produced like a theatre performance, with sound effects, background music, and original voice recordings.

An interesting story of the discovery of napalm and its use in firebombing Japanese cities.

A story of the futile development of a mechanical targeting computer by a Dutch engineer Carl Norton - the 3rd most expensive project in American WW2 developments (the Manhattan project is #1, B-29 is #2).

A story of the insanely ineffective attempts to bomb Japan using planes launching from India, and flying over the bump - the Himalayas.

Balcony Over Jerusalem by John Lyons

 A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond. First published in 2017, updated in 2024.

This is a difficult book to read, because of the amount of evil it describes. The author is an Australian journalist who lived in Israel for six years with his family. The 2017 ending is prophetic in view of the ongoing genocide in Gaza:

As Israel continues to rule over an increasingly large population – a minority Jewish population (based on demographics) is now on the brink of controlling the lives and movements of a majority Palestinian population in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza – Israel’s occupation is, inevitably, doomed. The only question is whether what comes next will be an orderly, political process or a violent, chaotic one in which many people will die. I am by nature an eternal optimist. But after six years of living amid this conflict I fear that the latter is now almost inevitable.

Israeli soldiers walk through the Palestinian market of the Old City of Hebron. 

This book is essential for understanding not only the Middle East, but also the hasbara - the Israeli propaganda machine directed at foreigners, and especially the reporting of events related to Israel in the mainstream media and policies related to Israel and Jews in Australia. An interesting aspect is that even his Israeli acquaintance, and a fellow journalist Noga Tarnopolsky smeared his reputation anonymously (he investigated it, found out, and confronted her).

At the heart of this [Israeli] strategy is very clever lobbying and very clever political diplomacy. The Israelis make sure that in Europe and the US whatever you say about this conflict you risk paying a huge political price.’

 

It has become almost a rite of passage for deputy editors of any major Australian news outlet to be offered a ‘study trip’ to Israel. Colin Rubenstein, the head of AIJAC, told me that AIJAC has sent at least 600 Australian politicians, journalists, political advisers, senior public servants and student leaders on these trips over the last 15 years. 

Today, I barely know an Australian newspaper executive who has not been on one of these trips. 

What I had not realised when I first arrived in Israel was that wave after wave of journalists, editors, academics, student leaders and trade union officials were taken to hear the same spin from the same small group of people used to defend Israel’s policies in the West Bank – that is, the occupation through settlements.

 

I was coming to realise that when you write about Israel you are open to a level of abuse I had never seen before. As a journalist, you quickly learnt that you could have a very pleasant life if you wrote what Israel wanted you to. In contrast, if you wrote what you saw in front of you – such as the massive growth in Israeli settlements in the West Bank – your editors would be hit with complaints and your professionalism would be impugned.

Essentially, the Israeli Government, Army and lobby groups did not want the reality of the occupation reported. Of the many hours of discussions I had with my colleagues in the foreign media, one comment shocked me. It was when I asked Philippe Agret, the bureau chief of Agence France Press, a question. AFP is one of the most powerful news agencies in the world. It is highly regarded as credible and independent. It is famous for resisting pressure in whichever country it operates. Agret and I were discussing how some media groups censored their reporting out of Israel in a way that they did in no other country. I asked him who he thought was self-censoring out of Israel. Without hesitation, he replied: ‘Everybody.’

We’ve had decades of correspondents that, no matter how different they’ve been one from the other, no matter how talented they are or how many Pulitzer Prizes they have to their name, always end up being accused of being either anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. At some point, this seeps into the DNA of the newspaper. This is what you can expect if you go there – to have your integrity hurled back in your face every single day.’ But, said Haberman dryly, he finally discovered how to placate Israeli hardliners: ‘If I didn’t want to be accused of hating Israel, I should start every story with: “50 years after 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, Israel yesterday did one thing or the other.”’