175/365: Critical Mass Łódź

175/365: Critical Mass Łódź, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

June 24th

Critical Mass for June! I don't go very often, but I just felt like it this month. And they rode right past my house, so I didn't even have to ride up to the meeting point.

151/365: The castle ruins in Besiekiery

151/365: The castle ruins in Besiekiery, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

May 31st

What a sight. I read about these ruins in a guidebook to castles in the Lodz voivodship, and decided to make them the destination for my first 100+ km bike trip. (yes, it hurt, and yes, it was worth it.)

The village of Besiekiery itself is very small- a few houses, a small school, but it dates back to the 13th century. The name suggests that its original settlers were Scandinavian- viking mercenaries in the service of our first dynasty of kings, the Piasts. 'Besiekr' is a nordic word meaning 'man wearing a bear skin'. But in Polish, 'siekiera' means axe, and so there is also a legend about the devil Boruta (who also dipped his claws in the history of the nearby Royal Castle in Łęczyca) striking a deal with a local noble that would allow him to collect the man's soul if first he built him a castle without the use of an axe- without a siekiera. In Polish: Bez siekiery!

What the poor devil didn't know was that one of the labourers was named Siekierka...

But that's only a legend. The castle is a little younger than the settlement, having been built around the year 1500. It used to have a large tower which held the main gate and a chapel, an open courtyard and a three storey house in the back. It was modified several times over the years, but has been abandoned since the mid-19th century.

Currently, the municipality is gathering funds to revitalise the ruins and make them a safe and welcoming tourist attraction. So far they've strengthened the remainders of the main house and rebuilt the moat. There's a little beach, but swimming isn't a good idea as there is a lot of duckweed and leeches. Yuck!

Oh, another interesting thing about this castle is that it's home to a pair of storks.

They come every year to build their nests on top of the ruins. Storks are very popular in Poland, we consider them to be one of our national symbols.

The stork is a bird that brings luck, and it's very good to have one on your property- they say lightning will not strike where a stork has his nest. And because storks like high places, many landowners will set up a special post or build a platform on top of the barn roof, or in the branches of a dead tree, to encourage storks to make their nest there.

I saw more than one stork on my way to the village. It's the season!

On the map, red is my planned route, blue is the actual path I took. Some of those roads weren't roads at all! Google Maps doesn't know everything ;)

View Łódź - Besiekiery in a larger map

150/365: Tomorrow

150/365: Tomorrow, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

May 30th

Epic bike trip coming up. Too busy to shoot anything more decent, but tomorrow's pictures will be glorious.

145/365: Red bicycle going to Rogów

145/365: Red bicycle, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

May 25th

I like cycling.

The problem is finding people who want to cycle with me. I'm in that awkward bracket: not hardcore enough for most enthusiasts, too hardcore for my casually biking friends. So, when I plan a trip somewhere, I usually end up going alone.

But this time, the trip wasn't my idea. "Let's go to Rogów," my friend Kasia (in the picture) said. "Let's go to the Life Sciences Arboretum." Only, of course, the minute I said yes, the planning fell to me. And planning is odd when you can't gauge the endurance of your group. Already, there were complaints. "Eight in the morning? Why do we have to leave that early?"

"Because it will be boiling hot by 11 am, and because it's thirty miles, and I can't see you going faster than eight on average."

And because I only know half of the way there. But, I didn't tell them that.

I plotted a route, strapped my new Android phone to the handlebars for GPS assistance, and hoped for the best.

We got lost, of course. Pro tip: when the opening of a trail is guarded by a headless Jesus statue, don't follow it. It's a very, very bad trail.

The next trip I'm planning will be lonesome. Apparently no one wants to bike sixty miles to see the ruins of a gothic castle.

Things we saw along the way were a WWI cemetery hidden in the forest in Wiączyń: 

...a village called Moscow:



Apparently the local lord took part in Napoleon's failed Moscow Campaign, and when he returned, he named the village Moskwa.

We crossed a terrible slippery log bridge over a swamp:



...then cycled through the Windows XP background...



...until finally, Rogów!



...with beautiful Azaleas:



...a pond full of lilypads, frogs, and fishies:







The woodcut typography used in the arboretum signposts is worth a mention. Look at the 'transparency'!



It was a good day. Here's the map. Orange trail is what I had planned, blue is our actual route.


View Wycieczka do Rogowa in a larger map

110/365: Crochet bicycle

110/365: Crochet bicycle, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

April 20th

Weirdness in Warsaw.

95/365: So many colours

95/365: So many colours, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

April 5th

This is a recent site. Like most building complexes in Łódź, this one died slowly, first succumbing to decay, then to demolition, and now...it's in limbo. People dump their trash and walk their dogs out here, or drink in the corners.

Other things I saw in Łódź today:

56/365: Critical Mass

56/365: Critical Mass, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

February 25th

I don't know what kind of a dumb idea of mine it was to declare the start of bike season at a Critical Mass in February, when it's -13 degrees Celsius outside... Brrrr.

13/365: Łodzianka

13/365: Łodzianka, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

January 13th

Łodzianka means woman from Łódź. Here she is at the train station on a misty Thursday afternoon. I don't know whether she's coming or going, or just taking a shortcut across the platform, but she definitely knows where she's headed.

More photos from around the train station:

282/365: Bicycle!

282/365: Bicycle!, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

October 9th

Also...Saturday! My fabulous flatmate ManiaKovalsky and I took our bikes to the outlet store. We stopped briefly in the park for a portrait session. It's a great thing when one person wants to be photographed, and the other is a shutterbug.

We should have stopped for longr, really. The background was just lovely:

...and my subject very graceful.

And I was thinking I had a deja vu when I took this picture:

No wonder. Two years ago:

173/365: Broken

173/365: Broken, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

June 22nd

It can't really have broken due to strain, not this way. I think one of the carts in the factory where I work hit it in the corridor. All because I don't have time to make a copy of the bike room key.

Well, it's ok, I have new gears now and they work much better. :)

158/365: A Weekend in Amsterdam

158/365: A Weekend in Amsterdam, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

June 7th

Shooting Amsterdam on expired film in a dirty camera results in pictures that make me very sentimental- they resemble the bad quality prints on puzzle boxes, postcards and youth magazines from the eighties. They seem to recall a time when there was no geotagging, no free sharing of terabites of images across the globe- you may have had the one high-contrast, off-colour photograph in your sparsely illustrated encyclopaedia, and that was all you knew. You had to imagine the rest.