So long 2010 - and thanks for all the fish

EWA ANDRZEJEWSKA
Editor

The story begins, oddly enough, with a man carryinga fish. When I was a student (a long, long time ago), as the Christmas celebrations were just getting going a few days before Christmas Eve, somebody brought a freshly caught carp to my family home. He asked us if we would like to buy it, and my mum, who likes carp dishes, agreed without giving much thought to the consequences. The result? For a few days the carp was left to swim around in a bath in the laundry room, enduring constant harassment from the family’s cats and dogs. The human members of the household also grew accustomed to Feliks (as this is what we had called him), paying him visits a few times a day. The problem arose on December 24th, when the carp was metamorphosed from a swimming fish into the traditional Polish Christmas Eve dish. Well, at dinner that day, when the fried carp was served nobody seemed to have much of a stomach for it. Wojciech Ciurzyński, the head of Polnord, also recollects the tale of a carp’s mysterious transformation into a Christmas delicacy on the pages of our magazine, while Ben Bannatyne, Central Europe managing director of ProLogis, until this day remembers his astonishment at seeing a fish swimming in the bath at his mother-in-law’s home during his first Christmas in Poland. Giving in to the magic of this special holiday, we wish all of our readers many wonderful moments over this special period, a rest from real estate problems and a lot of success in the New Year! May it be a period of stable growth for you all. In this issue we also gaze into the crystal ball for a vision of the near and distant future of the sector in more detail. And in the role of fortune teller we try to predict the shape of shopping centres to come in 2015, 2020, and 2030...