Reise nach Polen!

So this is going to be updated in multiple parts, mostly because there's a lot to update and also because it would get monotonous to read and write.

I also took over 400 pictures of Poland so it's going to be a little bit before I post them. I posted pictures of the giant pillow fight I was in but the rest is going to probably go up a little later this week.


I'm just going to give you guys a basic rundown of what happened first

Itinerary:

Gdansk, formerly the free city of Danzig and onetime home to legendary author Günter Grass, who's house I was not able to see.

Marienburg, home of a castle that we saw, not that exciting

Warschau: Amazing, simply amazing. Completely destroyed by the bombs of WWII but is not completely (if not almost certainly largely) rebuilt.

Krakow: Amazingly survived the war (mostly) intact, absolutely gorgeous however the side trip to Auschwitz put somewhat of a damper on the festivities.


In between all of these places we traveled by polish trains, which waver between incredibly adorably eastern European and actually comfortable. Our first train was a sleeper, which meant the rooms were incredibly compact. Even so we were able to fit at least five people comfortably in order to hang out and ride out the compulsory sobriety. I would not recommend sleeping on a train if you can avoid it. The train ride to Danzig shouldn't be more than a couple of hours but because our program directors elected to save us a bundle of money it took us 12 hours or so. The reason for this is the trains stops every so often for long periods of time in increasingly smelly parts of the country.

We randomly ran into two American dude-bros who were claiming to be making a film about the Holocaust. The general consensus among the ladies is that they were creepers. I think Americans in general are starting to bother me, which is a problem. I love America. Mostly I think it was because they interrupted our game of old maid, which was getting pretty heated.

Needless to say after disembarking (pictures to be posted later), we were all tired, thirsty and hungry. None of us really understood that being on a train for 12 hours means you can't get off and buy food and that we should have done that before hand.

Anyway after gathering myself together and cursing at everything that moved I joined my compatriots in disembarking from the station. It was here that we would get our first dreary glimpse of Danzig, as well as our first introduction to a man who would become more than just our guide, but also our friend. I'm speaking of course of Marcin, the polish guide who speaks 5 languages and free lances for National Geographic. Yeah, he's pretty impressive.

From there we got our introduction to Polish breakfast, which is full of meat and fruit all soaked in grease and fanned on a plate. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. I must have put away at least 5 plates of food, which was actually about average.

The hotel itself was 5 kinds of crappy. It was probably a nice hotel for Danzig, but there were just too many things wrong with it. The beds were small, not that I got to sleep in a bed, though the hotel was kind enough to set up a cot in my room. I shared the room with two dudes who were pretty crazy chill.


From breakfast we embarked on a tour of the city. I don't know what it is about the Poles and German (actually I do know what it is, most of them really hate speaking it and try to avoid it as much as possible) but our tour guide's speech patterns were confusing and almost impossible to follow. When trying to understand German it is incredibly important to hear the entire sentence in order to glean any kind of meaning. This is because german sentences place the primary verb in the second position and shove all other verbs at the very end, where they share space with sepearable prefixes and sometimes conjunctions. Our guide would pause at the oddest of places in her sentences and linger just long enough for me to forget what she had said to me so that the remaining words would be completely out of context. It was a taxing tour, though Danzig is a beautiful city. I could begin to feel my shoes giving way, and indeed by the end of the week they had holes in the souls, so my feet were in great pain. By the end of the tour I was exhausted, hungry, dirty and really really had to pee.


A little warning about Poland for those of you with weak bladders. Public bathrooms are not free, sometimes taking pictures inside of a building isn't free, and if you don't have any small change you can probably find yourself out of luck. Restaurants also do not allow you to use their bathrooms unless you are buying something, this is true of Berlin as well.


After the tour, our guide suggested that those of us who didn't want to walk around the old city could go to the beach where there were plenty of places to eat and we could walk along the longest pier in Poland. It isn't that long, but Poland also isn't really a coastal country.


A group of us grabbed lunch and beer (Polish beer is great by the way, Zwieck was my favorite, though I'm sure I'm misspelling it). Afterwards a small group of us stayed behind to explore the beach and drink beer. We were already kind of tipsy and frankly saw no reason not to keep going. I mean it was spring break man, what else were we going to do. Unfortunately Poland isn't as open about it's open container laws, which means we were all technically breaking the law as we loudly walked down the pier drinking beer (hey that rhymes!) but the cops didn't accost us or anything so that was ok. I remember really having to pee very badly but not wanting to face the woman at the WC twice in a row. We won't go into how we solved that problem...


Anyway of course we got lost, and if it weren't for some very friendly polish people who warned us not to speak any german we were able to make our way to the restaurant about 15 minutes late right as the soup arrived. The rest of was pretty relaxed. At some point I managed to shower and grab some more beer from the spätkauf down the street. I won't go into what happened after dinner because it wasn't very exciting. Danzig is a beautiful city in parts, but of all that we saw in Poland it was the most stereotypically eastern european, which is a shame because it was a genuinely beautiful city.



Next up, Marianberg!