Winter Wonderland


Still this is pretty much “juvenilia” as far as filming is concerned, but it shows the start of what KenBank was to christen “environmental video” on my channel. Taking the camera out to wherever I am and moving around with it. This is probably one of the first like that, and it turned out to be one of the most common ways of taking film.

So far, all the YouTube offerings were all done on my Fuji Finepix, and this is no exception.

There you go, this here hotel, if you want to find it, is, I believe somewhere on that map. Don’t ask me where exactly, but it was signposted from the road. And a very welcome sight it was on the road up to Gdansk as the snow started to fall heavily. I arrived here in poor visibility at the end of a long drive, and I didn’t see anything out of the window until the morning – when I opened the curtains and saw this pretty scene and immediately wanted to film it. But I couldn’t resist contrasting it with the mess I had made in the room by hastily going to sleep the night before and not bothering about anything…

On that note, be a little bit careful choosing hotels in Poland and East Europe generally from the road in winter if you haven’t pre booked them – not all of them (in fact only a minority of the country ones) pre-heat the rooms. When its cold, the first question you want to ask is whether they have any heated rooms free. In case of not finding any pre-heated hotel rooms, you should travel in winter in Poland with thermal underwear to sleep in under your pyjamas. I have even had occasion to sleep in socks and jumpers!

This is also my first ever hotel room film. There must have been dozens since then!

Keep it serious!

Another one of the earliest attempts to get old Soph performing for the camera. She’s five, and already has a great liking for the Phantom of the Opera.

We should revisit that sometime and see how far she’s come in four years – she still can’t keep a straight face, though. Jolly good thing, too.

At the Tandoori Palace

 

This was a snatch of the food at Tandoori Palace Restaurant in Marszalkowska, Warsaw, during one of our visits about four years ago. This is actually our second favorite Indian restaurant, the first being Nikhil’s Asian Village in Raszyn, just south of Warsaw. The ownership is the same and the menu and recipes are the same, but there is less clientele so the food is made fresh. There’s still a difference between dishes made to order and those which have been on standby for a few hours, so we usually go the extra mile for Raszyn. The Raszyn one doesn’t deliver, and the Marszalkowska one does, but still it is worth it.

We find that spending 250 PLN on take home curry makes 10 meals in total, so only 25 PLN per head on a curry meal. It may seem expensive but you do get a lot of mileage out of it, and so we like to do this about once a month. Sometimes like here we go to the restaurant, and then just get what we don’t eat bagged up.

I could tell an amusing story about Elena’s first experience of a real Indian style curry – when she came over to the UK and my parents asked if she liked spicy food. She said yes, but what she had in mind was the Belarusian version of Indian food. When my parents proceeded to give full spicey-licence to their culinary skills and produce as Indian a curry as I think any non-Indian could ever make, my poor little wife (fiancee then) was begging for a glass of water!

But she has got used to it since then.

Serious Artistic Endeavour

Serious artistic endeavour

The second ever “musical muckaround”. Sophie attempts “Think of me” from Lord Scruffy’s Phantom.

Some people think it inappropriate of me to refer to the composer of this and other lovely music as “Lord Scruffy”, but I have to say I think it quite justified. His Lordliness was conferred upon him by Her Madge as a recognition of his musical and other gifts to humanity and to the Nation, and who am I, who are any of us, to detract from that?

Here comes the birde …

Birdy song bride

A few seconds long only, like quite a bit of my early stuff, this shows a bride performing the birdy dance at her wedding reception with her new husband’s nieces.

In much of contentinental Europe, the performance of the birdy dance by a bride dressed in her wedding dress, at her wedding, with children, is a powerful fertility rite. The more iterations of the song performed in this way, the more children you are likely to have.