There are not many trips to the bathroom that result in staring into the void of cosmic madness. The toilet in Silesia City Shopping Centre is one of them. I have theory that these loo’s were built by an ancient cult as a shrine to old Lovecraftian beings so terrible that to gaze upon them causes a brain fart that liquifies your mind into a primordial goo that drips out of your nose onto the floor. Then it crawls up other people’s noses and does the same to them. On and on until human consciousness is reduced to barely aware tepid soup for the old gods to devour. The first inkling of this theory came to my mind as I walked down the long corridor to the toilets. On the walls there are shoulder height mirrors that reflect an infinite image of your head on each side of your peripheral vision. Already, the unknowable theme of infinity beckons your feeble understanding. At the end of the corridor, hiding the doors to the loo's is a glass brick wall in the centre of a circle. The opaque ...
The old train station in Katowice won the World’s Most Beautiful Concrete Building award many years ago. But winning the world’s most beautiful concrete building is like coming last in an ugly baby competition. You’re not the ugliest thing in the room, but you’re still smashed asshole ugly. But not everything survives progress’s onslaught and the old train station has been torn down. Now, it’s all glass, tv screens and international chain coffee shops. Starbucks, McDonalds and Subway abound. If you had a rock and a decent throwing arm, you could reduce it all to the broken shards of an architect's dream in seconds. The toilets too are a chain enterprise from a company called 2theloo. In an English speaking country the name is a clever play on words, but we are not in an English speaking country. Here we speak Polish, or the Silesian dialect. So for the most part, the word play, like the sign above the toilet entrance, goes over most people’s heads. It’s the same as if we use...