Gdansk

My first visit to Poland, to a city which I remember vividly seeing on the news in the 1980s

I decided at fairly short notice to go to Gdansk after the prolonged heatwave that hung around in the UK.  

Being quite northern, it’s average temperatures are more agreeable, plus I’ve been wanted to explore Poland for a while.

It’s a sign of my age that I remember vividly the scenes on television of the the Solidarity movement and it’s a testament to the graphic designer Jerzy Janiszewski that the logo remains equally memorable – more about this later.

Relatively few airlines go there from the UK so I ended up on Ryanair going and Wizz air coming back. It would be my first trip to Poland and also to Stansted and Luton airports, both of think like to think of themselves as being London airports.

There were train cancellations to Stansted, lots of last minute gate changes, people running to get flights, people in the wrong queue with somewhat tired officials saying “we are going to Gdansk not Prague”, thus setting off more running through the airport.  

After all this chaos, the flight set off about an hour or so late. The Ryanair pilot called himself the driver throughout: I wasn’t sure what to make of that but we arrived at Lech Welesa airport which was pretty efficient so I was soon in a taxi to the hotel.

However, unknown to me, there were multiple hotels with the same name in Gdansk so predictably I arrived at the wrong one. The receptionist said it happens all the time.  Why not rename them, then?!

So having dragged my luggage through the cobbled streets to the correct hotel, presumably waking up anyone who had opted for an early night, I checked in successfully and went to bed as I had planned an early start the next morning.