Just in time for summer

In times of sky-rocketing real estate prices, it can be extremely pleasing to discover that your living space has suddenly grown overnight.

Especially if the extension comes with a cascading fountain, swathes of wildflowers, and a newly restored synagogue as the extravagant detail.

..NOT BAD!

When you're one of the Warsaw non-natives with minimal chances of acquiring any scrap of real estate in the city within your lifetime, you really have three options:

a. Pretend you're a long-lost heir to one of the many disputed plots of land in the city centre where a townhouse stood before the war. Next, wait 86973 years and you just might get it back.

b. Set up camp with the hobos in Las Kabacki.

c. Take out a bank loan of 500,000PLN. Pay back twice as much, and in 40 years you will be a proud lord at your very own 60m2 mansion!

d. Screw it all, stick to your rental, and come to love the city so that it begins to feel like one big extension of your living room. Wandering the streets, seeing them change, is owning them. Just like in a giant game of Monopoly.

I have yet to try the first three, but d. has been working fine for me so far. The perks are multiple, including the fact that all maintenance and renovation is done - and paid for - by somebody else.

So that places like this:

can be turned into something like this. Solely for your viewing pleasure:

(c) gazeta.pl

NICE! Thanks, Warsaw!

The name of this recently refurbished corner of the city is Plac Grzybowski. Surrounded by towering corporate fortresses, it's an earthy enclave, constructed out of wood, granite, trickling water, lots and lots and lots of wildflowers, and benches on rails that can be moved from one end of the square to the other. Get this: you can move furniture around as you like. What else do you need to feel more at home?

This kind of environment fosters growth of little quaint cafes, just as the forest floor fosters the springing up of mushrooms in autumn. And sure enough, as we wandered into this area for the first time in a long while, the first door we stumbled upon was this:

Two cosily worn-out armchairs and the word Cafe above them.. cue myself & my coffee-starved husband!

Cafe Na Placu is the cafe your favourite granny would open if she knew about organic foods and was worldly enough to know of exotic drinks such as cider (strange how little known cider is in a country that counts apples as its most widely grown fruit). They stock the Savanna Dry cider from South Africa that I remember from Holland, which at 15PLN per bottle is an exotic treat... but so worth it!). They also have a few local brews, and a daily selection of cakes and desserts.

Lattes (9PLN) are hearty and frothy, and espresso (8PLN, double 11PLN) is pleasant even on the demanding palate that I have married.

You can sit outside, or pick your favourite chair in the granny lounge. There's plenty of board games to choose from and stacks of magazines, too.

I was intrigued by what resembled a maturing wheel of cheese with orange peel and turned out to be Pascha, a traditional - but now sadly forgotten - Easter dessert, which, as Wikipedia puts it, combines "those foods that are fobidden during Lent". After tasting it, I can confirm that it's a proper Lent rebound, with each small triangular slice containing something around a bucket of cream and six sticks of butter. But it's better not to know it, for Pascha is a delicious treat, more delicate than any cheesecake and richer than ice-cream. No wonder that in these days of cholesterol terror, housewives have had to bump it off their Easter menu.

See you, Na Placu Cafe! I hope next time we see each other, you will have gotten yourself a nice fat cafe cat.

Na Placu Cafe

Plac Grzybowski 2, Warsaw

Ambience: 4.5/5 beans

Coffee: 4/5 beans

Slowing Down

Slow food and fast food are a bit like fast blogging and slow blogging.

Fast bloggers narrate their life as they go, with inventions like Twitter on their side, always ready to update the world on the exact hour they brushed their teeth today. So what if nobody cares? Light-hearted like football commentators, they prattle on. Perky, untroubled fellows, they are. There is always plenty of blog-food to stuff yourself with at a fast-blogger's joint.

Slow bloggers, on the contrary, painstakingly labor over every post. They take weeks or sometimes months to produce their message to their world. Every word is like an ingredient in a dish they are cooking; it will fit, or it won't. And is it even worth it to go into the kitchen and dirty all the dishes?

As you will have guessed, I am a proud slow blogger. Like my fellow slow bloggers, I do fear the process of post preparation. Peeling the phrases, dicing idioms, chopping up adjectives. And the big final dishwashing of ideas... Sometimes it just seems too much fuss, and so I will end up going out to eat at somebody else's verbal restaurant. And another night passes by, while I skip from one blog to another, from a news site to a celebrity gossip portal, ingesting words, phrasings and formulations; but producing nothing of my own.

So as a proper Slow Blogger, in order to celebrate our forthcoming ninth post, I took my blog out to lunch in town. G skipped along on his hairy Coyote legs, saying he wants to document everything in photos. I agreed that it would indeed be good to obtain a tangible proof of my true intent to write another post. A colourful set of photos; a naked skeleton of a darned blog post, begging to be dressed, as yet again, I would be sinking lazily into the undemanding arms of Facebook and People.com that very night.

So, yes, slow blogging is like slow food. It takes a lot of effort but it keeps you physically and mentally healthy. It teaches you a sense of self-discipline. To celebrate this fact, G and I decided to eat at a recently opened establishment known as Ye Goode Foode, which proudly prepares "slow food fast". It sounded promising and so in we went.

Perched more or less halfway down Krucza Street, it sits at the very edge of what on weekdays is the busiest area of Warsaw. However, we found it in the middle of an idyllic Sunday afternoon, when the deserted centre of Warsaw was basking in early spring sunshine. The perfect time to stroll in the area and to come across a little place like this. The decor of Ye Goode Foode, though quite modern and almost minimalistic, has a pronounced rustic feel that matches its name. Think a modern cafe somewhere in the south of France; you can almost smell lavender and freshly baked bread in the air. And while there really is no lavender to be seen, a few varieties of beautiful fresh bread with golden crust are within your easy reach. Even at a time as slow and sleepy as a Sunday afternoon, when only four lunchers were treating themselves to it (including ourselves).

The menu is a delight to behold. It gives you a chance to indulge in what is my favourite way of eating. From a variety of small portions of inventive soups, sandwiches, quiches and salads you can compose a unique set of your own, trying out new combinations of flavours that you find intriguing in the menu. We went for a basket of that incredible bread (when the basket arrives, there are a few kinds of the crunchy treat in it) with a selection of breadspreads: buckwheat, avocado, smoked fish, chickpeas and garlic mayo. Yum! Before long, our bread basket was flashing its empty bottom, and the lovely waitress refilled it again to the brim at no extra charge.

An important part of the menu is the exciting drink list of beverages based on natural ingredients. Homemade lemonade with lemon grass extract, prune compote, apple mousse, and ecologically pure teas - nothing too fancy, but rich in flavours that bring back the memories of summer at your granny's. We went for homemade drinks of ginger (for G) and lemongrass (for myself), which arrived steamy and flavoursome. We had somehow missed the bit in the menu which said they were served hot, which was our fault. They were still great drinks, and I think it would be a good idea to come up with a summer of version of each, with icecubes and spearmint leaves, and a colourful straw to chase the icecubes with.

G finished off his meal with his staple double espresso with a very decent crema on it. Squinting in the bright sunlight and licking his lips like a satisfied cat, he rated the coffee as a 4 out of 5 . I suppose you can safely trust his tastebuds, although any tastebuds would have been bribed by the earlier treatment we had been given there.

I left the place reassured that slow food is the way to go. Is slow blogging, too? I hope to be back again before you assume I have decided that it is, too.