Filtry Finale

Ok so we are reaching the finale of the Filtry! Yay! I hear you think! OK I think that is clearly enough exclamation marks for today. So lets continue here, to be honest the filtry finale will be mostly about pictures as I found the end of the tour to be pretty much breathtaking.

So lets take that chain and lock off and away we go.
When people are craning their necks you know it is either going to be something funny, scary or just amazing..... which will it be?
Well it is the later.
This is THE filtry part of Filtry.
I have to admit to have gone a little silly with photos of it.



So there you have it that is what is underground in Warsaw. Please to all Warsawians or people who are visiting in Summer, get there on the weekend and see this it is really amazing and interesting. Also please stop drinking bottled water, the tap is there for free and you don't make waste!
So after a fabulous and sweltering day underground we have to let the sun set and move on. Next we hope to be back to the future so to speak and to be in Warsaw 2011!

The Mystery of the Underground .... Filtry II

So the thing about Filtry is that you can find water in all different ways, mostly they are practical, but at least on a hot day one like this, being impractical normally was actually really popular as it was creating a great spray for everyone to stand in while listening to the tour guide. With -7C outside, those days seem a world away now.
At the front of the treatment room, there are a couple of nice touches this one with the man drinking below the picture reads "Pragnienie", which means thirst.
The other side of the main door has a woman bathing, "Czystosc", meaning cleanliness.
I think these two are funny, as people in Poland almost never drink tap water and prefer to pollute the earth with bottles from bottled water (I will discuss this in another post) and whilst, and please allow me to sterotype and generalise here, the women in Poland tend to be immaculate and very well kept, the men can be less so. You notice it most with the men not understanding showering and deoderant. This is not just a summer phenomenon, and the ends of the scale, old men and young teenagers, tend not to bath very often. Well, according to smells I get the pleasure of.

Inside the treatment room
Time to learn about the processing of water.
You gotta love old school things. They are just clunky and cool.
Plus there are always shiny things to look at.
And grab, let the floodgates open!
These buttons just look totally out of a 1960's movie about war games with the Russians.
If you don't hand over our spies, we will use this filter to stop the sun reaching your crops.
What is this? A locked door!? I wonder what is behind it......

The underground resistance of ...... Filtry

More "lost" photos of 2010

So in Summer, on a stinking hot day we decided to go to Filtry. It is the water filtration site for the South and West and a small part of the Northern suburbs of Warsaw. When you look at the link above it just looks like a big park. Whereas the fact is that it is actually a really huge facility, the trick is that it is mostly underground.

In Summer, they run tours of the site ever weekend and every hour on the weekends. Basically you have to book in really early to get a ticket, or be like us and turn up on the day and hope that someone else doesn't show up. The security guards were actually really excited to have an Australian visit too, so it was kind of a nice thing for us all. Alas the tour was entirely in Polish and so Marty had to translate lots to me, she was a bit bored after 10 minutes and so I guess I missed out on lots of the crazy statistics that they quoted, but on the positive side I also missed out on the Engineer's life story and his love of going through every single item in the entire location. A win-win in the end.

So let's open the door and hit the floor.
Outside the main section history presentation centre there was a nice terrace, problem being that it was actually too hot for most Poles on the tour to stand on it, as they would melt. Most Poles are 100% icecream apparently. It is something I noticed this past summer when we had some awesome hot weather. The people who pay a fortune to go to Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia et al to lay on a beach for at least a week non-stop are actually afraid to stand near or in the sun in their own country. The only exception is the old men and women, and I do mean OLD, who get their gear off in the parks to end up looking like a dog's chew toy after a few weeks.
I would love to claim that I took this photo with a tilt-shift lens. But when I suggest to Marta we should buy one and go without eating for a few months, she thinks it not so logical. So instead these are actually photos of models in the history/museum centre. This is the museum itself.
The pump house.
The watertower, being the most prominent building on the site it stands 80m high.
It looks like this in real life.
But the inside is actually more interesting.
It is a devil in the detail. The design of the entire Filtry is somehow very attractive whilst remaining functional. I think that this is the epitomy of class.
After the tower, we drift out to see some old pumps and the like, as it was built in the late 19th Century some of the details needed to be imported from afar.
Then some were made just before the German invasion to start WWII.
It was getting warm, but the pressure was low..... according to this gauge.
As there are about 30 photos in this visit I will have to break them up into at least 2 posts. One down....