We went on a trio on a trip to northern Poland the last week end of October

The trio was : Marine, a French girl from my Krakow university ; Nick, an English friend of Marine, and me.

We decided the final destination was Gdansk (up north on the coast) but we thought it could be worth making a stop in Malbork on our way.

What is there to see in Malbork ???!!

Well ... that's a good question. They have a UNESCO-listed castle of Teutonic Knights which is quite nice and well preserved. In this castle you can see nice exhibitions of old (very old) weapons, armours, and other things from that times.

And what else ?

Well, er... pretty much nothing else : the whole city seems to live on that tourism business, and when the night came , being off season, we couldn't find anything opened but a kebab-pizza place .... which was run by a very friendly marocan happy to have an opportunity to speak French. (we all wondered how he eventually ended up there in this village, opening a pizzeria ).

Yet we ha quite a nice time there, we slept in a Harry-Potter-like huge empty scary dormitory, and it took us two days to discover where the strange smell in the city was coming from (a bad chinese restaurant ? a beetroot field ? .... the answer was : a sugar factory ! the second biggest activity in the city !)

Then we left Malbork to go to the main destination of our trip : Gdansk, the northern city on the coast.

There, we slept in a hostel located in a psychatric hospital (sic !), but it was quite nice.

Well, i have to saw it's aaaaaaaaawsome !

Gdanks is a beautiful small city, with a provincial feel, a magnificent architecture, a cool atmosphere.

Look at the pictures :

Some of the highlights are the St Mary's church, the biggest brick church in Europe (say "woooooow" ! ).
It was quite a mission to get in there because religious services were tightly following one another, so that it was impossible to find 5 minutes free to have a look ! Yet we eventually found a way to visit it, and then we climbed up the bell tower (400 something steps !!!!!) to have a breath-taking view over the city.

The centre is very nice (although small), and we spent days wandering around.

Does anyone remember was was Solidarnosc for God's sake ?!

We fortunately had time to visit the Solidarnosc museum, which is located on the docks, in the former headquarters of the Union.

And the first things i saw there was this f#@* souvernirs shop .... and that was the beginning of a strange feeling ... which i can not explain in words (neither in English nor in French).... Ok, let's say it was the-beginning-of-the-end-of-a-myth. And just the beginning.

Here is what the facade of the building looks like:

and here is what it looked like "once":

There was an exhibition sponsored by Carrefour and Geant, monsters-masters of French retail stores ....to celebrate the help of Solidarnosc in getting down the communist system , who would be more entitled than these allmighty products of capitalism ?

No no no, i'm not being sarcastic or whatever !
The exhibitions was pictures of people who were born 25 years ago, the day Solidarnosc constrained the government to sign an agreement on the famous 21 points.
The comments of these young people were very often absolutely empty, reflecting thus the emptyness of their generation (OUR generation), of our epoch, and our nasty little dreams. Ok, maybe i took the effect even more harshly as i'm reading "Generation x" of Douglas Coupland, which is a great report on the 90s generation.

And now the ground of the docks are empty, so are streets, (and brains ?), but stomach are more full (or that's what we're said at least), and heads are full also, of 21st century's dreams which don't stretch further than our very little own life expectancy.

I realised (why so late ? after so many years of studies ! ) that in France we are being presented quite a false romantic image of Solidarnosc. It did do a lot for Poland and its freedom, but what we often forget in France is that it is also an organisation which breeded strongly catholic conservatives and ultra-liberals. .... it's not that i have anything about catholics, or conservatives, or liberals .... but i just wanted to stress that point which we should bear in mind.

Back to a lighter topic : Crêpes !

We really froze our asses in Gdansk (and that was only the beginning) ... we didn't expect it, until we realised it was as high (i mean "up north") as Scotland !
So of course we spent some times in bars and so on (although our psychatric-hostel had a midnight curfew )
We found a really nice "creperie" which had a very kitsch décor as i love them : a train !

So we eventually left Gdansk and took the train to SOPOT , a famous summer resort.

It was quite nice : a typical English-style clean and a little posh summer resort.

Nice ... except that it was not summer ! Yet Nick absolutely wanted to show off in pants on the beach but he could stand it only 5 minutes !

So we spent half a day on the beach, making tourist pictures, breathing the fresh air of the sea, etc ....

And we were well advised to come to Sopot this very day, because thus we discovered the existence of a "wood pillars pushing in machine" ! ... and of course, encouraged by our "entrepreneurial management" lessons, we came up with the idea of creating a "wood pillars pulling out machine" ... which was probably already invented, and could be used once every 10 years when they renovate the beach and waterside.

Then we left Nick, which had to go back to Krakow earlier for "business matters", and Marine and I continued our journey on the coast, to Hel.

Indeed we had decided spending Halloween in Hel could be a nice idea. Besides, the city was described as a nice picturesque fishermen's village.

So we took the train to Hel in the afternoon. It was a James Bond like train : with doors opening to the outside in the end of the train.

Our James Bond train

When we arrived, the sunset was starting (yes ... it was 15h15 ! ), so i could not resist to make a few kitsch tourist pictures (i love it !)

Although it was freezing, we dcided to go to the beach (again ! !? ... well, that's all there is to do in Hel ... ) and we had an "aperitif" there ; the wind was blowing like a twister, and it's only because we were really motivated (yet not even drunk) that we could stand the cold and the wind and so on.
Well at least we can say we had the whole beach for us ! It had a strange atmosphere of ghost city , as if everyone had fled because they heard of catastrophy, whereas we were innocently and naively enjoying the landscape.

In the train to Torun , we passed by a cemetery, and it was beautiful, glittering, flickering, thanks to thousands of candles mourners had left on the graves. It really looked magic.

We arrived at 2 o'clock in the morning in Torun, where the only hostels written in the guidebook were way too expensive for us (moreover Marine had had her bank card swallowed at the beginning of the trip, so we were a bit tight).
So we decided : "come on, we won't pay a fortune to sleep a few hours ! ... Besides it's Halloween night, there will surely be a party somewhere where we could ansce, drink and even sleep discreetly".

And so we went on an expedition to find a bar. ... well, there were absolutely no bar open ! We wandered through the centre here and there ... NOTHING !!!!! And it was sooooo freezing !!!
Eventually we found a bar with 4 customers in it : two couple about to make babies on the sofa, while the boss of the bar was playing darts.
We had two coffees, and then try to be as discreet as possible so that the boss would forget our presence when he'll close .... IT DIDN'T WORK, and at 5 he kicked us out of the bar , together with the two couples of happy future parents.

We searched and searched and searched for a place warm (or at least just not freezing) to stay ... and couldn't find any.
At last we headed to the bus station (we had arrived by train, but the station was far from the center), to sleep until a bar would open at 7 or 8.

Er.... well it was not really a bus station, but rather a giant carton box (préfabriqué), where we were immediatly spoted by the local (What the hell are they doing here ? Tourist ? It can't be, tourist wouldn't sleep here ! But they speak some foreign language. Should we call the police ? I won't sit next to them.) We saw a défilé of all granny and grandpas dressed like for a wedding, carrying loads of flowers, waiting for the bus for a distant cemetery.
And we froze here for a few hours, pretending to sleep so that no one would ask us questions.

At 8 at last we decided to leave and visit the city properly and find a nice place to sit....well....I have to say that here they take this "all-saints" stuff really seriously(well, you guessed that already since there was no Halloween party to be found) .... aaaand .... everything was closed ! Not even a bar opened !!!!! Even the McDonald was closed ! Can you imagine ?! (We had to find until 11 for a bar to open) Eventually we were praying for globalization to do its work and McDonald to open and Halloween parties to be held ! Can you imagine ME praying for that ?! You must think "well, she must have been really freezing her ass to do that!" ... INDEED !

Of course Torun is nice, but there was nothing to visit this day (and maybe on normal days either)

And our train back to Krakow was only at 19h .. whereas by 3.30 in the morning we had already seen all what there was to see in Torun !!!!

So we took our time (still freezing)... and then we decided to go to the station and try to negoiate for another train

and the ladies there were putting a lot of bad will to help us (although i tried my best polish on them) : they gave only micro-granular information, and everytime you wanted to know more, you had to queue to another counter, and then another, and another. Ex :
There is a train for Krakow ? Yes
At what time ?
In half an hour.
Is it direct ?
I don't know, ask in counter 3
In counter 3 : No it's not direct.
Ok so when is the next one which is direct ?
I don't know, ask in counter 76.
At counter 76 : I don't know. The next one is in half an hour, but if you want to know if it's direct ask counter 3.
Ok, and what is the price ?
Ask in counter 943567, but to buy the ticket go to counter 32456.

Well, of course they said that with the necessary dose of flegmatism and a get-the-fuck-out-of-here look.

It reminded me an Asterix episode ! Well at last we could get all the information we needed (i felt much more confident about my polish afterwards, but much less enthousiast about polish kindness). The result was : trains before 19h were really expensive, so we ended up waiting for our regular train !

(I want to precise that since that bad episode, Polish people have prooved my dozens of time that they're very nice and polite and helpfull... i mean normal people, not people workin in services !)

On the train back we got "robbed" ... anyway we were broke, so ... but still they took my almost empty bottle of perfume, my batteries, and moisturizing cream ! ???? Er ... i would never have expected that !!!!

Eventually we arrived safe and tired in Krakow at 7 .... and it 10 i had a "surprise meeting" with my working group to start working on a presentation that we had to present to the class the same day at 15h30 !!!!! I was sure it was for one week later, but my group said "no, no" .... and eventually i was right....but we discovered that too late !