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So, after a long long walk to the train station in Szczecin and some confusion about 1st and 2nd class cabins we took a long, long train journey to Gdansk, in the North of Poland. It's a gorgeous city; one that had less than 10% left of it after world war II, and was completely rebuilt.
Our hostel is right in the centre of the old town, and it's a boat! It's so cool, just floating by the front row of restuarants and picture-worthy buildings, we said 'Let's just stay here' before we even checked in... we're totally coming back to Gdansk after we've been to Krakow. (Or that's the plan; no doubt we'll be enchanted by Poznan, Warsaw and Krakow too)
Last night we checked in and spent some time being excited by our location, then we went for dinner (we forgot to pack any food or entertainment for the 5 hour train journey that day) at a "Fish Markt Restaurant" (misspelling intentional). Despite my 'don't over-order' attitude we ended up with a whole plate of fish left over. But it was all very nice. I consciously ate Sourkraut for the first time ever, and didn't hate it! Adam had - drum roll - calamari, suprise, suprise!
After that we went back to the boat and sat.. looked at the clock (about 7ish) and decided we'd be terrible, terrible people if we didn't go out so we went for a walk along the waterfront and through the old town. Took lots of photos of pretty buildings and found a brothel or two. We got back to the boat at about 10pm (lock-out time) and went to sort out the beds in our room (Adam declined to sleep on the fabulous double bed I made on the floor as a substitute for the bunk beds) - after looking at my guide book I discovered that we'd actually just seen and taken photos of most of the major sights in Gdansk! Lack of planning is awesome!
This morning we set out to find breakfast and unexpectedly found it on the boat deck for 6zl (About 1.50).. sold! Then we went off to (re)explore. We found our way onto an island in the middle of the river and found a large research ship and a museum of sorts; there was lots of submarine-type things laying about. We also found a large theatre that we couldn't go in, a pretty church and book shop where Adam bought his much sort after 'real' English-Polish dictionary. Walking back we crossed a different bridge and found some spectactular pedlos shaped like VW Beetles, then we headed back into the old twon that we'd explored in the dark.
We found the Amber and Torture museum (odd mixture, I know) that detailed and displayed the 'Amber Forest' deposits found along the Baltic coast and the many cool 'inclusions' (when something gets stuck in a bit of amber) that have been found; we saw a lizard inside one! There was also quite a few cool carvings from Amber; pirate ships, dancing women and extremely intricate trees etc.
The torture section was interesting but nothing that you can't see at Warwick Castle; there were, however, lifesize models in a few of the displays and some very real sound effects (I absolutely did not make Adam go into each room first because of the scary noises). There was also some really cool - but very sad - carvings in the walls dome by the prisoners that were kept there. I posed for an hilarious photo with my hands in some shackles hanging from a wall and managed to get painful blood blisters on both of my wrists because of it; stupid torture. Good photos though!
We then headed into the main centre for some lunch and ended up eating pizza in a dingy bar; our trip was made more insteresting by some woman falling over and smacking her head in the ladies room though. She seemed okay but her husband insisted on calling an ambulance for, bless him.
After our long lunch (our waiter disapeared without giving us the bill and the other staff had no idea what we'd had) we went up the bell tower (354 steps!) at just after 1pm, meaning that we missed the spectacular bells ringing and we also missed seeing the 'ghostly girl' that appears in the top window of the building next door at 1pm every day; oh well, we're going back - maybe.
We then ambled back to the hostel, grabbing an amazingly tall ice cream each on the way. we 'spent some time' in the room after which I decided to have a nap and Adam went for a bimble to the tourst information place to practice his Polish and probably chat up some hot chick (they all seem to be gorgeous - stupid arians). He resturned with a bag full of leaflets and books that pretty much told us that we'd missed about three major sites - a cool painting at one end of town, a post office (where postal workers held off the Nazis for 4 hours before being burned to death) and Westeplatte (and island fort that 'held off' the Nazis for a remarkable amount of days before they swept into Poland en route to taking over the world). Like I say, we'll hopefully be going back.
This evening we went for a nice - small! - meal at a waterfront restaurant. We didn't eat much but we had fun playing with the panoramic function on my camera with moving objects (it tries to blend the frames into one photo, resulting in half-people and funny shaped limbs). We also developed an amusing game of seeing how many glances we could get from passers-by by placing me in various positions. The record was about 6, I think - disturbingly, from a young boy.
Tomorrow we shall be travelling to Poznan - another LONG journey, we shall take food this time! - and I will update after we have our adventures there! Goodbye!
P.S. The weather is now nice!
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