Warsaw, Poland

WARSAW, Feb 24 - I arrived in Warsaw from Vienna the evening of Feb 23, and was immediately whisked into a late dinner business meeting (it started after 10PM) at a Spanish restaurant.

This was the snowy scene in front of my Hyatt hotel the following morning.  

And this is the IBM Poland headquarters on the outskirts of the city, not far from the Warsaw airport.

A close-up of the entrance to the building.

Inside the building, I was particularly interested in and impressed by the Innovation Center which featured the latest of IBM server and software technologies.

As you can see, the center is also nicely appointed for customers and software vendors to work comfortably while developing new products.

There was even this cure Linux mascot (the penguin) sitting atop an IBM z9 mainframe.

Back at the hotel, it was refreshing to see these beautiful fresh flowers amid the frozen and snowy Warsaw.

Just how snowy it was can be seen from this scene visible from my hotel window.

And the same scene the next morning, just before I headed out to the airport on my way to Moscow.

At the airport lounge I took this cheery shot of the old Warsaw that was reconstructed after World War II, as the original old city was destroyed during the war.

Boarding the Aeroflot Tupolyev jet before the flight to Moscow.

Some passengers looked wearily at the plane, wondering what the safety and the service were like.  But I told my friends to relax as the Aeroflot international service has improved a great deal in the last few years.  In the end, we got to Moscow with no problems after pretty good onboard service.

And that's all she wrote from Warsaw.

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