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Published: August 29th 2010
The unthinkable has happened - I'm too tired to blog. AGAIN. I know, right? WTF is up with wearing self out on the actual vacation instead of saving some energy for the Internet?? Fortunately for my loyal readers, the neighbors in this guest house just got in and are a bit noisy...
Friday night, arrived in Gdańsk, Poland, after about an hour's delay leaving Reykjavík on Iceland Express. (No one could have predicted that a product called "IE" might have quality and reliability problems...) As many of you had already heard me relate many times, Iceland Express flight 267 direct from Reykjavík to Gdańsk operates only on Fridays. In the summer. Of which August 27 was the very last instance for all of 2010. So many ways to go horribly wrong! I may perhaps regale everyone later with tales of small things which did go wrong, but in Gdańsk the flight was behind me, my luggage even arrived, and a driver was waiting with a sign with my name and the name of my hotel. Fantastisch!
Andrea, you'd be so crazy proud of me. The hotel pick-up driver (a.k.a. the hotel owner's father) didn't speak English, so we conducted
our drive-time small-talk in GERMAN! Some of it didn't work at all, but enough did.
I got to the hotel after 11 PM, hungry and not tired enough. I strolled around the Główne Miasto ("main town") and I don't know why it always surprises me that European cities are so much smaller and closer together than my American map-reading brain expects, but it did again. Almost every Główne Miasto sight from the tour books lies within two blocks of where I'm staying, and I saw most of them in half an hour on my walk.
What also happened on my walk is that I got soaking wet. I prepared for rain, carefully shopping for the perfect compact umbrella and the
perfect rain jacket, but I forgot a crucial thing: shoes. Summer mesh Mary Janes with socks didn't handle rain or puddles well at all. Between that and the bits the umbrella doesn't cover, I was soggy from the knees down. And therefore cold, for the rest of the evening. Unacceptable.
So on Saturday morning, the first thing I did on my first day in Gdańsk was
head to the mall. I got directions for the tram to
Galeria Bałtycka, rode there, and shopped for shoe polish! Wait, I mean shoes. In Polish. Yeah, that. Most women here seem to wear stilettos or stiletto-platforms, so the shoe shops were packed with weird-looking items that weren't going to help me in rain. On cobblestones.
You know how it's a cliché about things being in the last place you look? Well, after at least 10 different strikeouts (impractical, hideous, didn't fit, way too expensive, or a combination of those things), I really had decided to give up and make do, and on my way back to the exit I passed a shoe shop called Martens that I thought might be worth a quick look. On my second pass through their display items, I spotted a sport/hiking shoe that I didn't hate, even though it had laces. Picking it up, I realized it was a Merrell. This store carries Merrells! I dropped the lace-up shoe like a hot rock and hurried to look for other Merrell styles, since I know they fit me. And there, tucked back in the corner, there they were - Jungle Mocs, my warm, water-resistant, slip-on, orthotic-friendly travel standby! In RED! <3 Bought them, celebrated with some
Italian-style ice cream, and hopped the tram back to town.
Of course, this guaranteed that for the rest of the day in Gdańsk, the sun came out and not only was it dry, but I was
too warm most of the day. Next day, Sunday, with a dry forecast and a visual inspection out my window revealing sun, I headed out for the day in the old Mary Janes - you can imagine this caused it to POUR again suddenly, just after I'd walked too far to turn around and change shoes.
But enough about that later - right now I'm exhausted and ready to cover my feet with some European-style bedding instead!
See all my pictures from Gdańsk on Flickr:
Gdańsk 2010 Set
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Jim
non-member comment
We, your loyal readership, expect more prompt updating. Get on that, eh? Priority 1: helping us vicariously live through your travels. Priority 2: the actual travelling. Also, I totally read your entries to Vanya and Archie. Vanya would like to make sure you bring him back some delicious Baltic cheese.