The weather has turned and the rain has started to fall but I had a few hours this morning and I decided to visit the town of my early childhood Andrychów. It was an old industrial town specializing in the manufacture of small engines as well as textiles.  

I was captivated by the look of this factory. It is here that textiles were manufactured and processed. I’m not sure what it does now didn’t really inquire.  It does have that feel of communist era industy regardless of the filter I used to express the feel of the place.    

 

I remember this plane as it marked the street on which I lived. It stood on top of the hill. Incidentally it was placed there in 1976 to commemorate the service of pilots in defense of the country during the war. 

I continued my walk in the rain eventually reaching the building housing the flat in which I spent my early years. I remember it being this giant building but it’s small as I look at it now. I rember playing in the grounds around it which is one of many in this area. I remember that I got my arm stuck in the grate on the bottom there. We were comparing our arm thicknesses by seeing how far we could reach inside. As I tried to get my arm out it got cought. The fan inside there wasn’t on but the panic of my arm being mulched inside of it caused a scare. Right before I left when a lot of snow fell and there were a lot of snowball fights and forts for defense. I had just been told that I was leaving the next day. I never got a chance to say goodbye to the friends I used to play with. It’s because those were still communist times and my parents were afraid that if I said anything someone might make a call and cancel our departure. 

I also went by the first school that I attended. It’s scale has also changed from my perspective. When I started going there it was a brand new school. I wonder how those classmates have fared in life. I just have a vague memory of how they looked much less their names.  

I kept walking and passed through a park in the middle of the city. It borders a church whose spire towers over many buildings in the area save for the factory chimneys further back. This park is lush and green in the summertime and an impressionist painting of it hangs on my parent’s wall.  

There is a palace in the centre of the city by the church and the park. It has fallen into disrepair as restoring it is beyond the budget of the town. It was quite the wet day and coupled with the size of the town I quickly passed through it. I walked by a few shops that I remember visiting when a different proprietor was housed there. Over time people move on and some of them I know are no longer with us here as they’re buried in the soil.

This bridge is finally finished it was in need of repair as it was old and damaged especially when the flooding occurred a few years back. It represents the new amongst the old fading in the back. As much as I like it I watched the traffic all around. I was waiting for the bus to take me to the village where I am staying now. There are lights on either end with complicated intersections and only a single lane each way. I kept thinking to myself how shortsighted it was not to expand it further so that the investment would be greater with higher dividends down the road.