Paper Towns

I knew very little about Poland before moving here. Almost nothing about Warsaw. “I hear they have good pacts”, I used to dad-joke¹.

Since then, we’ve been trying to get better. We recently went to the National Museum in Warsaw, where they have a new “Gallery of Polish Design” exhibit which is aimed squarely at dipshits like me who have a weird thing for mid-century design and electronics housed in discolouring plastic. Here’s a video of what you can expect in the exhibit:

Although not exactly vintage, they also had a vintage-inspired “paper town” toy that reminded me so much of Nintendo’s Labo. It’s basically a box filled with sheets of cardboard that you punch out and bend and fold into various parts of a ’town'.

As we were leaving, I noticed they were selling a couple of these in the gift shop. So, of course, I bought them.

Here’s the finished product from a different set that we made earlier, so you can see what they look like finally constructed:

My daughter (who’s two and a half), was too young to ‘get’ the Labo² but she absolutely loves these. She loved punching out the little buildings and vehicles and handing them to me to construct. The first night, she took the restaurant (the two-tiered building in the back-left of that bottom picture) to bed with her. My wife even said that if she was in need of a present for a similarly-aged toddler, she would get them one of these packs. They’re cheap, extremely cute, very tactile and recyclable.

If you can’t make it to the National Museum in Warsaw to buy them, you can also order them from ringoringo.pl.