On the Road Again

For excessively broad definitions of the word "road" anyway.

...Ye gods I am the worst at Journal updates. I used to post them regularly, but the last few years I've just been slacking off all over the place. Gonna do better for 2016.

My ass is once more parked in an airport departure lounge, with one more hour to kill before boarding. This time I'm heading to Gdańsk, Poland. I had a week of vacation time left for this year, and figured I'd best actually go somewhere instead of just filling my days with Internet and a sleep schedule that becomes more and more skewed as the days pass. My original idea was to maybe head up north, to Tromsø or thereabouts, for perpetual nighttime and snow and the aurora borealis, because I have experienced the midnight sun, but not the other way around.

So why Poland instead? Turns out flying inside Norway is frigging expensive, you guys, especially around the holiday high season. I think I'd have had to book a flight like six months in advance to get anything not stupid costly. Also, there has been just about fuck-all for snow this winter, and abnormally warm over the whole country. Forecast for Tromsø was about the same as Bergen, albeit a few degrees colder, and overcast as hell, and when your entire reason for wanting to go is snow and astronomical phenomena, that sort of weather puts a bit of a damper on things.

It snowed in Bergen this weekend, because of course it would snow right before I left for somewhere else.

With northern Norway no longer being a very appealing option, I asked around for destination ideas. My boss suggested Gdańsk, which has never really been on my list of places I want to see, but I looked into it anyway.

It has one of, if not the largest brick church in the world? And it's in the Gothic style? Well shit, I wanna see that. Old cathedrals are so cool. There is also a hell of a lot of WWII history there. Like, really a lot. I didn't much care for History as a school subject and found it a bit boring, but it's very different when you're surrounded by it and can practically feel it around you. It's like how any book you're required to read for a language class just sucks by default, whereas if you were to read it on your own time and of your own volition it might not be so bad.

So I was mostly decided that hey, this is a place that sounds pretty cool. I should check it out. Then I spoke with my dad on Christmas Eve and mentioned my tentative plans, and he told me some more cool things. Turns out we have quite a bit of family history in the area. My paternal grandparents met at a casino in Sopot, one of the other cities in the Tricity area, and they lived in Gdańsk for the few years my grandfather was managing the local office of one of Norway's shipping lines. They got out of Dodge in 1939, for what should be obvious reasons.

Well double shit, now I definitely have to visit this place.

Plane is boarding now.

Here I go.