Well I’m here and I’m currently typing on my super fast broadband service over here in our apartment over looking the shipyards and the Baltic Sea beyond that.
I started Tuesday last week at 07.00 when two blokes came round to remove my electronic tag. I then jumped into a taxi to Leeds Bradford airport and caught the shuttle to Heathrow. From there I flew to Warsaw and then on to Lech Watessa Airport Gdansk. The flights cost me 390 quid and I booked them through my old probation workers cousin who owns a travel agents in Great Horton Road. He told me that because PIA didn’t fly to Poland he couldn’t offer me a discounted rate but that this was the cheapest route he could find. I landed at the same time as the direct Gdansk flight from Doncaster on Wizz Air that I could have caught for 35 quid.
Upon landing I was ushered towards the customs office where 5 freezer bags of washing powder that my mum packed was pulled out of my suitcase. I had to sit in this office for 6 hours while lab tests confirmed I wasn’t a drug trafficker. Not impressed the customs officers had two burly security men escort me off the premises and advised me not to set foot in the airport again.
Obviously due to this delay Natalya had left and I found myself lost. I walked to a petrol station to use the phone but found out that the money I had was useless. Even though Poland is abroad they use the Zloty not the Euro. Fortunately I was able to hitch hike with a friendly lorry driver. I wondered why we seemed to be driving away from the city but I assumed he knew best.
We pulled up in a lay-by for the night and he offered me a drink of some sort of local spirit. It was strong as the next thing remember is waking up in the back of the cab and I certainly can’t remember taking my clothes off. I was awoken by the sound of the lorry driver and a lady talking. I assume she was his mother as they seemed to be very friendly but I’m not sure I’d like my mother to dress like her and thought it was a bit weird when she greeted him with a French kiss. But they are foreign I suppose she then greeted me with a French kiss. For some reason they then began to argue (he was probably embarrassed by here attire) and she left the lorry cab. This seemed to annoy the driver and we drove on in silence. Half an hour later he turned to me and told me I was at my destination but as I got down from the cab I realised I was at the port of Gdynia and not Gdansk.
To cut a long story short Natalya eventually found me and I arrived to a rapturous welcome from the Kowalczyk family.
In all seriousness Gdansk is a really lovely city and I could recommend it as a great place for a city break. It is a very cosmopolitan city that still holds onto its cultural and historical importance with some fantastic architecture. I’ve even found an English pub called the Black Bull.
Gdansk is Poland’s largest port and is probably most famous in Britain as the flashpoint that saw the start of World War Two (the German name for the city being Danzig). It is also in the shipyards where Lech Watessa (whom the local international airport is named after) started the Solidarity movement which eventually brought about the end of communism in Eastern Europe. It is also one of the host cities for Euro 2014 which is being held in Poland and Ukraine. For any transport buffs it’s got a really exciting Urban railway services called SKM that covers the whole tricity region of Gdynia, Sopot and Gdansk.
I was going to post a load of links to various websites but they are probably too many and varied. I might come up with a guide to Gdansk as a seperate thread at some stage.
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