The weather for tomorrow

But perhaps they had never even started. Perhaps the hot weather was simply too acceptable, predictable and boring for them. Which was something that could certainly not be said about all the other things that were going on. After all, there is nothing worse than a lack of excitement, especially in the morning traffic and before the first coffee of the day. One thing is for sure – if all the happiness of this world, interwoven with all the unhappiness of the world, somehow, and perhaps magically, made a super-sophisticated pattern allowing us to assess current events in an unambiguous and definitive way, and if there were people in the world who learned how to read such a pattern, then the passengers of the 33 tram would claim to be among them.

July 2014 was hot. And not only literally. A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 crashed in eastern Ukraine and the government there offered to resign. Daesh started to call itself the Islamic State and extend its area of influence. Ebola was spreading across West Africa (the epidemic has only recently been curbed). The World Cup was underway in Brazil (eventually won by Germany, to the anguish of Argentina and a few Polish supporters). And Novak Djokovic beat Roger Federer at Wimbledon (6:7, 6:4, 7:6, 5:7, 6:4). Meanwhile, in Poland the entire country (and the passengers of the 33 tram) was following the phone-tapping scandal that spelt the beginning of the end of the Civic Platform administration; the construction of the second line of the Warsaw underground was slowly (“too slowly”, according to the consensus on the 33 tram) nearing completion; while politicians and fruit lobbyists were calling for the ostentatiously patriotic consumption of local fruit (a campaign the 33 tram wasn’t interested in). The dollar stood at PLN 3 and a litre of petrol could be bought for PLN 5.5. Uber, then a not very well-known taxi-ordering app, had only just been launched on the Polish market, just like the rather similar mobile app Tinder – in terms of picking people up, that is. Only a few people had heard of MEP Andrzej Duda or MP Beata Szydło. The Shakespeare Theatre in Gdańsk was preparing for its opening. The construction of The Tides in Warsaw was just beginning. Warsaw Spire only had a dozen or so floors and underground work was in progress on the building site of Q22 nearby. The 33 tram, interested only in what could actually be seen, was profoundly silent about all of this at the time. Not for long, though.

This was a good time to join the legendary ‘Eurobuild CEE’ editorial team. The room it works in and the team itself looks much the same today as it did that summer; but if you take a closer look, this is not entirely true. The revolutions that have taken place in people’s lives can be discerned with the naked eye. The magazine’s archive has gained 18 additional editions and the website is a few thousand briefs richer. Innumerable gigabytes more have been saved on disks somewhere. Including those holding texts about office robots with calculation powers our older brothers or sisters could never have even dreamt about, and pieces on the still not always seriously treated field of virtual reality. The office’s walls and ceiling have gained a few cheerful signs of exploration and exploitation. I am also proud to have been responsible for some of these. And yet, for myself, it is now time to embark upon a new professional journey. What will the next two years bring on the macro and micro scale? Who will enter the CEE market and who will quit? Where will the most successful brands grow and which markets will they target? Who will join forces – and who will be at daggers drawn? Which projects will be developed, which will be knocked down? We may well be on the verge of another hot summer…