A Sailor's Life Source: Wikiquote
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Saturday, June 02, 2007
Gdynia, Poland
It's been a little while since I've posted, so I apologize, but we've had some problems with Internet access, so posting new stuff has been a little difficult.
Poland was a good port visit. The downtown area of Gdynia was very near to where the ship moored. Many people were very impressed with the food, and I had to agree that it was very good.
The first day in Poland we just walked into Gdynia, which is a moderately sized city. I took a few pictures, but somehow I didn't find anything interesting to take pictures of. First we stopped at a cafe, but they didn't serve dinner, which is what we were looking for. We found a place called Oktoberfest. It wasn't particularly festive, but for some reason underground restaurants are much better than street level restaurants. I ordered something which said filet, but it ended up being chicken. The chicken was really good. There was some kind of mushroom sauce on top of it, and it was just a little charred, but the charring made it better. We made one final stop at a blues bar, which turned out to be surprisingly good. The bartender was quite eager to talk about what he thinks of the economy in Poland. According to his explanation of Poland, there is only a lower class and an upper class. This was his explanation for why his bar was relatively empty that night. The rich people go to the high class restaurants, and the poor people can't afford to go anywhere.
There were a couple of interesting things that I learned about Poland. To say "Thank you" means that you don't want any change back. I believe that I experienced this without noticing at first, but once I had left Oktoberfest, discovered very little cash remaining in my wallet. The other thing that I learned was that it is considered insulting to drink Vodka with anything in it to dilute it. A good vodka should be able to be drank straight with no Coke, or orange juice, or whatever you usually mix your vodka with. I did not learn this from experience. We were warned about it ahead of time by a powerpoint presentation with a lot of useful information.
The blues bar has jazz on Tuesdays and blues on Wednesdays, but we were only in Poland for the weekend, and didn't get to go back on a night when they were playing music.
The following day we went to Sopot, which was a city a little ways south of Gdynia. Sopot is were the part life is supposed to be. We didn't hang around late enough for any of the party life, but there was a wider selection of restaurants, which we took advantage of. While we were walking around a number of thunderclouds rolled in, and we ducked inside a mall just before it began raining huge torrential buckets of water. The streets flood quickly when that much water is coming down at once, and we were glad that we stepped inside. While we were in the mall, we ate at a Mexican restaurant. The fajitas were pretty good.
The rain didn't last long, but by the time it stopped we were tired of Sopot, and we went to a theater in Gdynia which was playing Spiderman 3 in English. My personal opinion of Spiderman 3 was that it was very good. Other people didn't like it very much, but I thought the whole storyline was good. The only fault that it may have had was that it was a little too predictable, but it had a lot of good action scenes. That was our last night of liberty in Poland, but we had a good time there.
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