Driving in Poland

     This'll have to be quick. It's 7:30 in the a.m. and I'm in the lobby of the Hotel Aquarius, which is also a Spa, and nobody does "spa" like these gosh-darn Europeans, what with their love of healing waters, psychic enemas, and whatnot. The Aquarius has even got aroma therapy. And a big pool. I plan to stay away from all that. My mom is the sort to head straight for it, I think, but she won't, unless dad wants to join her.
     Yesterday started out great but then got difficult. We left Danzig, finding our way (somehow) to the S6, which is more or less a freeway going north. And that brought us to the 6, which is a great highway that crosses the northwest part of Poland from east to west.
     Beautiful country! Incredibly green, lots of rolling hills with farms: canola, potatoes, leak (I think), and who knows what. Whereas much of the Danzig/Gdansk area was a mixture of charming old-Europe sights and sounds plus funky urban decay (and spectacular artifacts of Soviet idiocy), the rural zone along the 6 is essentially tidy, and endlessly charming. It's as if it were Germany.
     But hey! It was Germany until 1945. But the new highway is obviously Polish, and it's mostly first-rate.

For some reason, some hotel residents decide to start up rock bands in the hallway. They're quite bad. No, I'm not kidding. This was immediately outside my door.

     Polish drivers include a hefty segment of angry lunatics. There's much riding of bumpers, crazy passing, blowing of horns, etc. The passing is the worst. Evidently, it is routine for Poles to drive way to the right to accomodate passers who flat don't manage to pass before the opposite traffic arrives! I kid you not. It's stunning to see, and I saw it a dozen times.
     Also, pedestrians seem to have abandoned any margin of safety of the kind that is routine in Orange County. I think they're lookin' for that special "centimeter of safety."
     Me, I'm lookin' for a few meters.
     When we got to Kolobrzegu (formerly Kolberg), we drove around for a while to check out the town, but then we tried finding the hotel. You wouldn't believe how hard it is for the likes of us to find anything in this linguistically god-forsaken land. (Just kidding.) We figured we'd just bump into the Aquarius (bad idea), but I got tired of that and bought a street map. (That was an adventure in itself.) Then the horror began. I could figure out where I was and where I needed to go, but any attempt to traverse that silly kilometer was thwarted by the Poles love of prolix and poorly situated signage, inexplicable road name changes, one-way streets (I became indifferent to that), and occasionally blockades (poles coming from out of the ground or whatnot). Also, I think the map is just wrong sometimes.
     Now, I love to drive where driving is crazy. And I don't mind driving in reverse to get out of tight dead ends and the like. But the hour and a half I spent going just a few kilometers was hell. All the while, my mom was making her patented completely unhelpful suggestions ("lets talk to a taxi driver") and my dad was endlessly saying, "which road are we looking for? I think I saw it!" (No.) (For the record, I did stop and ask seemingly knowledgeable people for directions, but they did not speak English (or German), and they just rattled off a bunch of Polish, which is as helpful as chewing rocks.)
     Anyway, we finally got here, though not before I started telling my mom "no, we're not gonna call a taxi" and my dad: "no, you've never seen that road, and you need to keep such information to yourself."
     This place is pretty fabulous though. We're about to attempt breakfast (who knows?). Dinner last night was quite good.
     Gotta go!