To the Coast!

Monday, July 13, 2015

Oh dear.  It’s our last morning with the family!  Swavek has already left for work.  In fact, he left early so he could go to the gym first!  The boys have convinced Ania to make burritos for breakfast and she puts out plates of onions, black beans, red peppers, lettuce, chicken from yesterday, lettuce, pickles and garlic sauce and the five of us build our own.  They are really good!  I like the garlic sauce on it.  We tell her that we usually use salsa and I promise to get Ginger’s recipe for her.  (Ginger, are you reading this?) Michal eats two fully-stuffed burritos!  He’ll be a teenager in less than a year and he’s getting a head start!

We tell stories about our injuries and scars and our boys’ mishaps and compare our favorite stories about the Holocaust but inevitably it is time for us to hit the road.  Lots of hugs and promises to see them in the USA and we’re off.  It had been raining but it’s dry for us to take our stuff out to the car!

Interesting sights along the way....

 We have directions from Swavek to get us to the right road; but we have to pull out the BIOB when we go awry.  She’s much better behaved today and we get to Torun with no trouble.  We even find a carpark right across from the Old Town, which is our destination! And there’s a toalety very close.  It is 2 zloty for us but on the guys’ side it can be one or two, depending! Torun is a medieval walled city with lovely old red brick buildings with the most amazing facades.  

Copernicus was born here and gave his name to the town’s university.  There are lots and lots of shops that sell gingerbread!  There is even a place where they will teach you to make your own!  You have to let it bake for twelve minutes or fifty Hail Marys!

Even the WC is historical!

Old Town Hall

He was a rafter who led all the frogs out of town.  Sound familiar?

except these!

 There was a castle that belonged to the Teutonic Knights.  When the townspeople finally attacked the castle and won the battle, the mayor had the castle destroyed and garbage dumped there.  The only thing they left standing was the tower that housed the toilets!  You can visit the ruins, though!

There is a very old cathedral.  And like all the rest of them it is quite dark inside!  The walls are painted with scenes from the Bible in addition to the usual opulence.

We have lunch in a “milk bar” which is a place for cheap and good food.  Marilyn has a plate of pierogies for just a few dollars and I have a salad and a pork loin stuffed with cheese and pineapple, with potatoes, for under five dollars!  I even had a soda for that price!

On the way out we locate the Leaning Tower.  It really isn’t plumb!  It’s not just my photo!

We’re heading now for the Sisters Lodge Hostel in Sopot and give the BIOB another chance to redeem herself.  She does a fine job!  It rained on us a bit during the drive but it has quit before we arrive and we even saw a rainbow!

There is parking on the street and when we find the button for English on the parking meter, it says that today is free!  We learn when we check in that parking is free from eight in the evening to ten in the morning.  That will work for us!  We have to be gone before ten if we want to do everything we have planned in Gdansk tomorrow!

Our room is quite comfortable and we even have a small balcony!  There is also a large terrace for everyone’s use and free wifi and breakfast.  The sheets and bathrooms are all clean and what more could we ask?  Glad we remembered to bring our towels, though, and soap!

We’ve brought all our luggage upstairs since our room is on the first floor (In Europe, the first floor is called parterre, so we have stairs to get to our first floor room.  We don’t know if we’ll get another chance to reorganize with so little trouble, so we take advantage.  It is so nice to have everything back where it belongs!  We’ve been fishing around in our suitcases every night to bring up clean clothes for the mornings at the family’s condo/flat.

It’s good, too, to get caught up on the blog!!