Gdansk

On the drive to Mikalojaky, Katrina saw these stork nests.
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Budget travel has its drawbacks.  Who would have thought that budget travel meant a free show of large and hairy dock workers in their underwear?

We thought we were well traveled, and had "been there and done that."  But nothing could prepare us for the Hostel Baltic Ocean in Gdansk.  We even made up a song about it, to the tune of Hotel California.

We thought we were well traveled, but nothing could prepare us for the Hostel Baltic Ocean in Gdansk.

There is nothing I would like more than to go back to, say Paris and stay in a plush hotel with someone else's money.  But when it is my money, we put the "basement" in "bargain basement."  Which is more or less the way we found the Hostel Baltic Ocean in Gdansk, Poland.

We have stayed at a gazillion hostels over the last few years.  Hostels can come in a wide variety of flavors.  A hostel is not a hotel, where you obtain a room in exchange for cash.  At a hostel, you get a bed in a room and a bathroom down the hall.

That said, hostels are well aware that people do not really like to share a room with others they do not know.  Gone are the days when a hostel was two large dorm style rooms -- one for the men and one for the women.  Hostels nowadays are a collection of smaller rooms were families or friends travelling together can all share a room to themselves.  We have never had to share our room with anyone else.

That is, until we stayed at the Hostel Baltic Ocean. We knew we were going to have a hard time finding accommodations in Gdansk because we arrived on a weekend, and there was a festival in town.  After much searching, we found 4 beds at the Hostel Baltyk, which we renamed the Hostel Baltic Ocean, so it would go with our song.

My first impression of the Hostel Baltic Ocean was that the insides hadn't seen a broom since the Russians liberated Gdansk from the fleeing Nazis. My second impression was of being reminded of the scene in the Blues Brothers were Elwood brings Jake home to his apartment above the train station, and Jake asks "How often does the train go by?" to which Elwood answers, "So often you don't even notice."  At least the jackhammers from the road construction outside drowned out the noise from the passing trains.

There were 7 beds in our room, but the staff assured us that we would "probably" not have to share the room with anyone else.

But what the staff failed to mention was that in our room were two doors.  The doors themselves were nothing to worry about, but what was behind those doors did give us some concern. It would seem that behind those doors were yet more dorm rooms.  And the only path to those dorm rooms was in fact through our room.  So our "room" was really more of a corridor to the "other" rooms.  This can be a bit of a nasty shock when one is, say, drying off after getting out of the shower, and in bounces some sweet young thing, or some hairy dock worker in his underwear.

After one night of sleeping in the corridor I had had enough and requested that we get beds better situated.  To my relief, we got a room attached to our old hallway room, which dead-ended in actual walls.  SO, we no longer had to sleep in a virtual corridor.  But we did have to pass through it to get to our new room.

This time, there were six beds in the room, but again, the staff again assured us that they were "almost positive" that we would have the room to ourselves.

But now the corridor room was inhabited by 7 very large and very hairy men with booming laughs.  We called these the Bathroom Joke Septuplet.  Not that we could tell what jokes they were really telling, but it would seem that the hand gestures for bathroom jokes are universal.  Judging by their size and hairiness we decided they could only be burley Polish shipyard workers.

Now we all had the pleasure of bursting in on the shipyard workers every time we left or returned to our room.  These were clearly fun-loving guys who were very friendly, if not totally unrefined and all the happier for it.  They did not seem to be fazed in the least by the fact that the rest of the guests used their room as a hallway.  Every time we passed through they were all sprawled across their beds in various stages of undress and joke telling. During every transition through the room we would learn just how hairy and large their were.  And that they wore blue boxer shorts.  With red stripes.  Not all of them, of course. Others preferred polka-dots.  The image is burned in to my retinas and I can't seem to shake it.

And I just didn't know that human beings could snore so loudly, or in so many pitches. As I tiptoed through their room in the middle of the night to make a trip to the bathroom I could make out at least three distinct snore-patterns.  But what really got my attention was that the two empty beds in our own room were now occupied by, judging from their lacy nighties and empty beer cans on the floor, two sorority girls.  They were sound asleep and apparently unfazed by the hairy men and their 1000 limbs and bottoms sprawled over the beds and floor of the room next door, nor fazed by the fact that they were sharing a room occupied by 2 parents and 2 children.  Clearly, the staff of the Hostel Baltic Ocean did not conduct a 20-point personality test to each potential resident and then pair like-minded people together.

The construction work on the road outside went on all night.  At 6:00 a.m. I gave up on any hope of actually sleeping and decided to get up and go for a walk.  I quietly opened the door to the corridor room, only to find that the shipyard workers had completely vanished!  Not a single trace of them was left, save for a single pair of blue-and-white polka-dotted briefs on the floor, and the blue striped boxer shorts hanging from the curtains.  Gratefully, there are some questions in life that we will never know the answers to.

Gdansk was really a nice town.. They even had a TGI Fridays with a great Tex-Mex burrito.  But, I could have done without the Hostel Baltic Ocean.  What a big disgrace.  With a scary face.  There are plenty of people at the Hostel Baltic Ocean.  But not a room to spare.  Please get me out of there.

We are now in Visby, Sweden, which is on Gotland Island.  It is very nice here.  I think I'll settle down here and run a bicycle taxi to shuttle the tourists to and fro.