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!

Give me the name of this street

     You know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that we got here, but it's just...it's just—there it's a little different.
     Take the bathtubs. Here's a pic of my tub in my hotel room in Gdansk, Poland. It's hard to tell from the photo, but there's a big difference between the depth of the tub and the height of the tub wall—it's like a mile high—and so, when you step out of the tub, it's a big f*cking step, man. It could kill a guy. I'm serious. They oughta issue parachutes or something.
     And what do short people do?

     Here's the hallway outside my room. It's strictly from The Shining. It isn't just the look of the place; it's that nobody's ever outside their room. It's like I'm the only guy on the 2nd floor! I can hear 'em knocking around sometimes. But they never show!
     —Yeah, I know. The hotel in the Shining was supposed to be in the U.S. Whatever.

     This is the Polish potato dumpling thing I ate for lunch today. It was quite good (I skipped the bacon). Since I was raised on my mom's cooking, and since my mom's cooking is pretty close to the kind of cooking they do in northern Poland, I found it quite familiar. Very gooey and potato-y. These dumplings had a spinach filling, I think. I like to say the word: "dumpling, dumpling, dumpling."

     These Poles have got złoty on the brain. I've got dollars and I've got Euros (see above), but Poles want nothing to do with 'em. It's złoty they want. 

     When I tried to leave my parking garage yesterday, the gate just wouldn't open, and that pissed off all the Poles behind me. (They like to use their horns, man.) So I managed to drive over to the nearby "buro," and I talked to the garage parking official there (a girl). She said I needed to pay up. "OK," I said. I tried to use my credit card. "No credit card," she announced. How about Euros? No. Dollars? No.

     "Złoty," she said. "Polish money."

     "So you mean to tell me that I've got to come to you to give you złoty every time I leave this garage?"

     "Thees ees true." 

     But I don't hold it against her. It's the system man.

     I don't know if it's the Scandic Gdansk or it's just Poland, but the phones are mighty dodgy around here.

     Today, I tried to call someone to confirm a tour for tomorrow, and I couldn't get my hotel phone to accept the numbers I was typing in. So I went down to the desk, and the pretty girl there (they're all pretty) said I didn't need to use the prefix, 'cause I'm in Poland. So up I went to my room to try the number again, sans prefix.

     Nope.

     So I went downstairs to the gal at the desk (still pretty), and she tried to call for me. It didn't work.

     "The phones," she said, cryptically.

     She tried another phone. Finally, she got through. She shoved the phone in my face. "Talk," she instructed.

     Tonight, we noticed that about a dozen seriously pretty girls—dressed to the nines—were hanging around the lobby area of the hotel. My dad pointed out the phenomenon. "Maybe it's a hooker convention," I suggested.

     But they looked a tad wholesome for that. 

     I still don't know what that was all about. I'll do some investigating. But they do have lots of conventions and meetings and stuff here at the Scandic. 

     "They take pride in it," announced my mother.

     I just stared at her.

     It goes without saying, I suppose, that much of the world is fucked up. And here we see about 50% of the fuckery: weird-assed voltage around the world, including in Poland. I think I fried my C-PAP machine.

     These card-keys suck. At least they do in Poland. I've had to replace mine twice. My folks had to change theirs too. Every time I go down to the desk and tell the gal or dude about the problem, they flash a quizzical expression, as though this never happens. 

     I guess they're just being professional. No use revealing that you know what a shithole you're working in.

     I'm actually having a wonderful time in Poland, and I really like the people. 

     Still, I'm thinking of writing a letter of complaint to the Gdansk Picayune. These Poles need to know that their language is seriously fucked-up (although, admittedly, it sounds pretty good coming out of women). 

     Take this map of the harbor area of Gdansk: check out the names! Here's a quick list of some of 'em:

Gdańsk Główny
Chlebnicka
Dlugi Targ
Koskiot pomeno-nicki
Szopy
U Furty

     "Szopy"? "Główny"? "U Furty"? They've gotta be kidding!
     I've been doing all of the driving on this trip, and that's not easy, 'cause these Poles are wild and quite possibly suicidal drivers. But sometimes you want to remember the name of a street, and so you tell everybody to look for that, 'cause you've got your hands full just trying to stay alive.
     These Poles. They stick like a novel on every street sign. You wouldn't believe it. You look at one of these things, and then you see something like, "Gdańsk Główny Chlebnicka Dlugi Targ Koskiot pomeno-nicki."
     Yeah, give me the name.