Cześć!
Just a quick note to say I returned yesterday from my holiday in Poland.
Well, I’m back. Yes, from my holidays! Yes, in Poland. Where it was it very hot. Just like in England. An unusually hot July, it was about 30-34ºC (86-93ºF) but on occasion it did reach as high as 36ºC (97ºF). Apparently it was pretty much the same at home and it’s still hot today.
I met with some Polish friends of ours who are living locally in the UK. We flew into Katowice airport on the 9 July after a two-hour flight from Liverpool airport on Wizz Air, a low-cost Polish/Hungarian airline that serves Central and Eastern Europe. There are good points and bad points about this airline - the good points are that it’s cheap and the seats are not that uncomfortable. The bad points are that it’s very basic (but then who really needs patronising crap dished up as ‘in-flight entertainment? Just take a book with you); the organised chaos at the check-in desks (at Warsaw airport you had one queue for three flights) and on the flight itself (it’s every man for himself on there: if you can’t sit with your family, hard luck).
Anyway, we went right across Poland - right down from Kraków in the far south not far from the border with Slovakia. Krakow was a really beautiful city. We spent three days pottering about there: drinking vodka and beer, talking and seeing things. I saw the salt mines and Auschwitz: a seriously grim place, as you’d probably expect. It’s not like the large place you see on TV or anything like that. It’s huge. Seriously huge. If you ever get the chance to go to Poland, you must go and see it - even though that, at the time, my legs and feet were killing me and I didn’t see the very worst bits like the gas chambers.
And almost nobody in Poland outside of the big cities of Warszawa, Kraków and Gdańsk speaks any English. So if you were coming on your own without an interpreter you’d have to stick to the main cities.
Oh, and let me tell you that in Poland, the roads are not pretty. They are absolutely appalling and I think many Poles are embarrassed at their state, especially when they can go over the border to Germany and they have such nice roads. They have a 20-mile stretch of motorway for the entire country. And they charge you 6,50 zł every few miles. And Polish drivers are insane - not considerate at all; it’s very much “every man for himself” out there. If the speed limit’s 65mph, they’ll drive at 100mph.
The day after, we went on an eight-hour drive from Kraków right in the south of the country to the Masurian lakes (an area of Poland which has several thousand lakes - like the English Lake District but much larger). Anyway, we spent seven days at the Masurian lakes, much of the time doing very little apart from eating traditional Polish food like kiełbasa, spicy pork and chicken (both on and off the barbie!), drinking (oh yes, plenty of that - both vodka and the local beer, Tyskie) and talking. Three rounds of friends and family turned up to stay anything from a few hours to a couple of days. I went to see the cities of Gdańsk and Sopot. Sopot is a beach resort - a bit like the Polish version of Blackpool in some ways. It’s a nice place to have a look round, but Gdańsk was much nicer. You see more German tourists and car number plates up that end of the country.
Finally, we went down to Żyrardów which is a town in central Poland where my friends have a property for the last two days, where we stopped at one of my friend’s mother’s apartments. More eating and imbibing thus ensued.
And that’s pretty much it. I wouldn’t really say I had an holiday and that I relaxed - it was more of an educational experience infused with lashings of good food and drink and boiling weather. Which, at the end of the day, can’t be all bad.
I may post some photos of my trip on the photoblog later.
