Fourth (and last day) in Polski

Breakfast alluded us again today and we spent 45mins trying to find somewhere. The Elephant Club had a great breakfast menu but didn't open until 1pm. So we ended up having a KFC breakfast which is pretty much the same as a KFC lunch.

We then boarded the train to the zoo, Kerri got on quick and got some empty seats. Turned out that they were the only seats in that carriage which we think must have been an empty livestock cabin.

Google lied to us about a 12min walk to the zoo, it was more like 40, but hey ho, we got there first time.

The zoo was quite empty (of people not animals) and was pretty good. They had loads of a-maz-ing tigers and bears and elephants and cool chimps and shit. Most animals wanted to come and see us and Kerri fed some four legged thing some leaves. The elephant wanted in on this action and tried to grab her with it's trunk.

Mark had a foot long hotdog, it wasn't the best and by the time he'd scraped all the crap off it, it wasn't exactly a foot long.

After the zoo we braved a bus back to the train station and then back to Gdansk, we're black belts in public transport now.

We decided to pack before we went out as there wouldn't be much time in the morning.

We finished the holiday off with a curry, it was pretty hot stuff, Kerri didn't eat hers. So we washed that down with some cocktails at The Elephant Club (it was oipen by now).

Third day in Polski

Very late start due to not getting home until 5am the previous night/morning.

We rushed straight to the station at midday and scoffed our way through a Polish McDs. Mark ordered a burger with no cheese and got a burger with no cheese, if they can get it right over here with the language barrier then why not at home (probably because I don't speak chav innit).

We took the train to Sopot a nice city on the coast which is quite modern. After a stroll around we stopped for a coffee at the square and watched the world go by. After dodging beggers and gorillas we went to the pier, an impressively long pier too (no smoking on the pier - learn a lesson Western!).

Off to Sopot museum next, we got there at 4:03, it closed at 4:00. Stupid museum. On the walk back Kerri met a polish cat which made her happy.

We went to the oldest bar in Sopot and then grabbed some food. It started to rain. A lot. Bad times for the suckers sat outside, especially those eating soup, it was filling up quicker than they could eat it,

At home time we mostly froze on the station and then got rained on a little bit. Kerri got confused and thought it was time to nip out and get dessert then realised it had gone midnight.

Second day in Polski

An early start was needed today to enable us to get to Malbork castle, a massive legendary castle about an hours train journey away.

Needless to say that we didn't get an early start as we were a little late rising and then Mark hadn't factored in Kerri's 'getting ready tax'. So an hour and a half later we left for breakfast.

Breakfast is harder to find than you'd imagine, unless you want ice-cream that is! After a while we found somewhere and suffered the normal quality Polish service. After that we went to the train station to find that we'd missed the hourly train by 2 mins.

This is mainly because the English guy in front of us in the queue insisted in trying out his Polish rather than taking the help offered to him by a fluent english/polish translator (we took this option).

When we did get on the train we swiftly got to Malbork Station. Well I say 'station', it'll really just a few paving slabs next to the line that the train happens to slow down for. There are no steps or underground way out of the 'station', you have to run across the tracks.

Malbork Castle was a short 40min walk...if you're a crippled old woman, or a 5min stroll for anyone else. The castle was fairly impressive, al though as we didn't have DNA samples to hand, we were not allowed the audio tour.

The people there are fluent in many languages including Polish, German, Spanish and italian; just not English. So we made our own History up instead. Who would have thought that the Teutonic knights trained killer attack monkeys under the leadership of King Wolf.

Upon leaving we needed the train back, and as there were no ticket booths at the 'station' we had no idea when the trains were, whether they'd stop and if they did, how you get tickets. So we followed a couple of local drunks around and jumped on the first train that arrived (90 mins later). Mark spoke made up German to the conductor and scored us two tickets to somewhere.

Luckily the train went the right way and we recognised the station. There are no announcements and very few signs at the stations so there's some guesswork involved.

Later, out for dinner we went to Sphinx as it looked nice (indoor trees growing) and it had great reviews. Kerri ordered a red wine and got a white, so ordered a Cosmo instead and got a Carling. She did get a free cocktail because of this though, so it wasn't all bad. Oh and then another two free drinks later, I think they're trying to get her drunk, they may regret that.

After consuming large quantities of food and many drinks we paid the whole £40 bill and headed back to the apartment. While in the courtyard, outside we met Jake, a friendly polish chap and then his friend Viktor. Jake immediately ran to the shop to buy us all beer, not going to turn that down.

We then went to Jake's apartment (probably not advised behaviour according to the foreign office) for a party and Vik tried to make Kerri dance to old polish records, didn't happen. The apartment was FULL of photos of his dead grandfather and had the most disgusting toilet ever (full of floaters). After an hour they decided to give us a 3am tour of Gdansk, nothing strange about that at all.

The tour involved climbing through ruins, walking by the river and taunting guard dogs. Mark thought that murder was on the cards and kept the Polish away. Luckily they didn't want to kill and rape us, they were just friendly and wanted us to appreciate their nice city.

The crazy tour ended at 5am and we returned to the apartment wondering what the hell had happened in the last 4 hours. Mark doesn't understand how Badger manages to attract so many crazy people. You will all get to meet then soon as they said that they're coming to Birmingham in 3 years time.

First day in Polski

It's time to go to Poland. Unfortunately this involves getting up at 3am which didn't make us very happy.

Mark had a tight agenda timed to the minute to get us onto the plane. Kerri mostly moaned about this in between drinking the largest cup of coffee in the world (it came with it's own tray).

At security it was deemed that Kerri's bags were too heavy and large so some organisation of the cases was needed which screwed up Mark's schedule.
Also we had to remove our shoes, this meant that Kerri had to strut around the airport in cow print socks.

The plane journey went pretty fast, in fact we landed early, go Ryan Air! We were delayed however as in our excitement we left Departures before collecting Kerri's oversized pink luggage. Security wouldn't let us back in so we went to Lost and Found. The nice man there calmly informed Kerri that her luggage didn't make it from Birmingham. Kerri was not calm about this. Luckily the nice man was an idiot and didn't know what he was talking about and the case turned up 5 mins later.

We were soon at the apartment which is nice, Thomaz who owns the place showed us several times how the door lock works which is good really, as we don't have those in Blighty.

Food was in order so we wandered around, on the way we passed several dozen people all selling amber. Every shop here sells amber, people sell it outside their house, market stalls sell it. Basically the whole amber industry is saturated, why does everyone sell the same thing? Someone should start selling hats or something, they'd clear up. We soon found a nice looking restaurant next to a river. After a bout of slow service we tucked into our grub and then a pirate ship pulled up. 10 mins later we were on a pirate ship sailing to Westerplatte (yarr!). The trip there was very interesting and we passed many a sight. Unfortunately our guide only spoke German so we had no clue WTF was going on and spent the whole trip pretending to be pirates.

Westerplatte was where the first shots of WWII were fired. Kerri re-enacted this for the tour party, they were mostly impressed. Oh did I forget to mention that several beers had been consumed by this time. Bad times for the Polish although apparently they put up a good fight. Not so sure about that, perhaps they're being a little bit biased as the general understanding is that they got their asses kicked a little bit.

We caught a different pirate ship back, it seems there are a lot of pirate ships in Gdansk!

Following our pirate adventures we grabbed an ice-cream. These were served in thimble sized cones but held 2 tonnes of ice-cream. As we tried to eat these we saw someone wearing clogs, this was funny but we're pretty sure she didn't cotton on to us taking the mick out of her (maybe not).

It was time for more beers after that and some more noms. Food wasn't great so we just got hammered. Don't remember much after that.