I Wanna Gdansk With Somebody....

Every time D gets a day off I know he secretly wishes he could spend it on the couch playing Xbox (or Nintendo as I call every gaming system ever created) or laying in bed catching up on TV shows. Of course, instead, he selflessly succumbs to my desire to travel the country and we always end up taking a road trip somewhere.

There's an area North of us on the Baltic Sea called the TriCity area. It's made up of three cities: Gdansk, Sopot and Gydnia, which are all located just a few minutes apart and sit on the coast with a population of over a million people. I've heard Gdansk is the prettiest city in Poland so naturally I've been wanting to visit. If the Polish people wanted to make any of our lives easier, they would spell it DONSK, as that is how the word is pronounced. For some reason, I can't find it in me to drop the G and continue to refer to it as "Ga-dansk", as it looks. 

Gdansk is an easy two hour car ride away from us and we spent it taking turns replacing "Gdansk" with the word "dance" in popular songs. After two hours of "I Wanna Gdansk With Somebody", "Just Gdansk", "You Make Me Feel Like Gdansk'n" and "Tiny Gdansk'er" we had finally arrived in this beautiful town.

I was in complete awe over how gorgeous this city was. It was so different than anywhere else I'd ever been before. Never in a million years would I think to visit Gdansk, Poland before moving here, but it is easily just as stunning as some of the most famous places I've been around Europe. Everyone we met was so friendly, too. There were a ton of foreigners in Gdansk and I didn't get the constant stare downs from people in the streets like I have "AMERICAN" tattooed on my face as I get when walking around our town. It was quite refreshing. After walking through Gdansk's Old Town, we got back in the car and drove to the next town over, Sopot.

Gorgeous Old Town

Sopot is a smaller, resort-style town right on the beach with a long pier for people to walk on. It's a really cute, quaint, town with a lot of cool shopping, restaurants and nightlife. Sopot is famous for this "Crooked House" built in the middle of the shopping area. I don't know much about it except that it looks cool and the guy who built it was almost certainly on mushrooms. Nonetheless, it made for a great photo op.

We had such an amazing day exploring this area and can't wait to go back. I feel so lucky that we can just jump in the car and drive to all these cool places and I can't wait for our next adventure.

In other news, I've started mentally preparing myself for Thanksgiving. It's my absolute favorite holiday and I want to make sure D's American teammates all enjoy it since they can't be with their own families. My grocery shopping experience is probably a bit different than most people at home. Sure, usually you make your list and may have to go to a few stores to find all your ingredients, but my preparation requires quite a bit more steps. First, I write down everything in English that I need. Then I translate these words into Polish, if they aren't simple enough to spot just by looking at them. It's then necessary to convert any recipes in cups/oz to ml and grams. Thankfully I don't use recipes, except when baking, because honestly I've never been too good at the math there. To really prepare myself for this shopping endeavor, I have also "google imaged" pictures of some of the products that I need that will be more difficult to find so that I'm not whipping out my iPhone in an attempt to show the grocery store person what a Pecan looks like. Here's an example of how part of my shopping list looks this year:

One of most difficult aspects of Thanksgiving Preparation is figuring out the logistics of everything. This becomes quite a bit more complicated with a European size oven the size of my childhood Easy Bake. In my fairytale mind, I had envisioned myself making friends with all the neighbors by Thanksgiving, and simply thought I could ask them to use their ovens in addition to my own.  Hey, maybe I would even invite them to attend their first Thanksgiving Dinner?In reality, I have still yet to even see any of my neighbors besides the one woman who didn't speak English and still managed to yell at me for taking my dog out behind our apartment. Somehow I'll have to make do on my own.

This week's edition of  "Is This Real Life" came when D and I walked to this coffee shop by our house. He ordered us two cappuccinos and a pastry for himself and we sat down at a table until they were ready. There were only 1-2 other people in this coffee shop at the time and after a few minutes, the barista yelled something to Deividas in which we assumed she was telling us our coffee was ready. He took the two coffees from her and told her he was still waiting on his pastry. She then went and gave him his donut and he brought the coffees to our table and we started to drink them. Moments later, the lady was at our table telling us that the drinks we were having, weren't in fact ours. I told her it was no problem, that we would drink them anyways and not to worry about. Little did I know she wasn't worried about our satisfaction, whatsoever. She continued to yell at Deividas for taking the coffees (keep in mind, she gave them to him in the first place) and then said we would have to go pay the difference as these cost more than the cappuccinos we ordered! Coming from the land of Starbucks where your drink is free if it's too hot or too cold, we were shocked. She said it wasn't her fault we didn't speak Polish and I had to take a moment to myself to do some mental meditations so I wouldn't say something I might regret. Eventually we got to a point where we laughed it off but I still couldn't believe that happened. (Side note: The overwhelming majority of Polish people have been really nice to us, customer service is just completely different than what we're accustomed to).

I will continue spending my week preparing for Thanksgiving and hopefully finding all my ingredients. The other day in the grocery store, an older woman came up to me when I was getting sweet potatoes and asked me a question (I'm assuming about the sweet potatoes because they aren't as popular here). I told her I only speak English and she giggled and gave me a hug. I'm hoping my grocery store experiences this week have a lot of those type of encounters and less of what I experienced in the coffee shop :)