Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

This may be my least-planned trip yet, in some ways. I'm in Poland, in Wrocław. I only finished reading the guidebook chapter for Poland on the plane (and still haven't read the chapters of the countries that I'm headed to after Poland!), so I have only the faintest idea of what I'm going to do. On the other hand, I have a hotel booked for every night of this trip, and most of the intercity travel plans are in place. Tinny's responsible for the lion's share of that.

I realized on arriving at Frankfurt that I didn't actually know what flights Tinny and her family were arriving on, so I didn't know if they was going to meet me in Frankfurt or Wrocław. Her parents were on the bus from the gate to the airplane (longest bus ride from gate to airplane ever!), and they didn't know where she was either. They also didn't know where they were going to spend the night!

We ended up parking their luggage at my hotel and walking around the Old Town looking around. The Old Town has a very attractive mix of gothic, art deco, and art nouveau elements. Cute bridges between scenic islands. Pretty churches. Beautiful stained glass in the cathedral. It would be hard to imagine better weather for walking around the city: it's warm and sunny without it ever being too hot.

Eventually, I got email from Tinny saying that one of her flights had mechanical difficulties and that they'd arrive later this evening. She gave me details about where her parents were staying. Their apartment rentals place was a mini-adventure in itself. The address was on the (enormous—the second largest in Poland) main square. Our search for the number ended up taking us three quarters of the way around the square. The name on the buzzer for the rental company bore no relation to the name of the company that Tinny had booked with, so we were only able to ring the right bell because someone was leaving who knew which button it was. Then we stumbled around in a dark, unmarked apartment building for a while, trying to find the right door.

After we'd gone over to the apartment, to make sure we knew where it was, we went back to my hotel, to pick up their luggage and then went to a Polish restaurant around the corner. I had a delicious "leavened soup" and pierogies topped with pork cracklings. Yum.

I'm thoroughly exhausted, mostly because I slept poorly on the transatlantic flight. For some reason the plane kept the cabin lights on until about 4am in the arrival time zone, and it must have been about 80F in the plane. Somewhere between Austin and this flight, I managed to lose my eye mask, which made it hard to fall asleep with the lights still on. I had to fight to stay up until full dark (quite late in this northern summer), but I think it's now late enough that I can reasonably go to sleep...