Wittenberg, Berlin and Poland - Part 3 of 3

Today was a day of errors. It was our day-trip to Poland. It blew. Our initial reaction after our trip was to say, "Eff you in the A, Poland!!" But, really, it's not Poland's fault that the trip sucked hairy balls. Well, it was *mostly* not Poland's fault. I will explain. (can you tell I'm trying to avoid getting nastygrams from upset Polish people?)

After breakfast, we had a day trip planned to travel to Szczecin, with a quick stop to check out Krzywy Las on the way. Krzywy Las is a crooked forest, and photos of the place have been floating around the internet for a few years. But, it's not that well known, and not really a 'destination'. I found out it was in NW Poland, and as luck would have it - that's where the town of Szczecin is located. So, perfect detour, right?

Anywho, we get in the car & load up the GPS. Yes, Poland is included in our GPS' maps...but for some reason - it wouldn't tell us how to get anywhere. It would tell us how to get to the town of Szczecin, but it wouldn't let us put in ANY addresses. I didn't have an address for Krzywy Las - just the name of a nearby town, and a general area to look for. But, we couldn't even put the name of that town in the GPS.

Slight panic. But, no worries - we decided to just run back inside the hotel & write out Google Maps directions to get to the town near the crooked forest, then from there to the mall in Szczecin where we were going to park before starting our walking tour of the city.

Ok, cool. I start writing out the directions....

Great Hammer of Thor, Polish is freaking IMPOSSIBLE! It's nothing but c's, z's, and y's. It was the hardest thing ever to write out three pages of Polish street names. I was starting to really dread the trip - how the hell were we going to be able to pinpoint street names, when I can't even decipher what the hell it is I'm writing down??

No, no, no. I can't think like that. We're awesome at adventuring, right? Suuure...

So, after my momentary hissy fit, we head out to Poland. It was going to take us a little over an hour and a half to get to our first stop in Poland. Initially, the drive was easy.

Then, as we started getting closer to crossing the border, the roads started to change.

These were the ruttiest roads I've been on in a looooong time. We were still on the autobahn, and I swear my bladder almost vibrated out of me. (gross mental image, eh?) They were truly awful. Once we exited the autobahn, it was basically a cobblestone road all the way to the Crooked Forest.

I could never find really good directions to get to the Crooked Forest - so I'll outline them here, for any of you who may want to make the drive. So, all of you folks that don't give a rat's ass about how to get to the Crooked Forest of Poland - look away now. (but only for a minute or two - I still want you to read my blog!).

The Crooked Forest is in between the towns of Gryfino & Nowe Czarnowo (good lord, even my hands know they're typing Mushmouth). If you're coming from Germany, head to the town of Gryfino. If you have a GPS that actually works in Poland - even better. Once you're in the town of Gryfino from the 120, you will HAVE to turn right or left. The 120 dead ends, and if you go straight, you'll run into a building. So anyway - You will have to turn right or left onto the 31. Turn RIGHT (south). And keep driving on that. Follow the 31 out of town. You will get to a fork in the road where the 31 veers left, and another road will take you right. Take the road to the right (I believe it's Łużycka street)!! At this point, there will be a pipeline on your right. Slow down, and keep watching the pipeline. There will be a dirt road on the right, before you come upon a power plant. At the entrance of the dirt road, there will be a *tiny* wooden sign that says, "Krzywy Las". Turn down that road. You'll see markers on trees that point the way. We just parked on the side of the road and followed the path on foot. There was NO ONE else nearby.

I know the directions sound like there is a lot of driving - but really, it took about 7 minutes to find our way (and that was driving slowly thru a town with lots of pedestrians).

While driving thru Gryfino to get to the forest, I realized something about The Mister...

He panics when he sees pedestrian crosswalks. If he even THINKS a person is about to cross, he'll gun the car, and blow thru the crosswalk. It's not like he's being an ass & doesn't want to wait on a pedestrian - it's not that AT ALL! He just absolutely panics, and says, "Oh my God, there's someone coming! I have to hurry up!"

What a freak show. (love you, babe)

Anyway - we made it to the Crooked Forest. It was small, but really cool! I am glad we took the detour. There is a theory as to why the trees are crooked, but no one knows for sure. They were planted before WWII, but once the war broke out, they were abandoned. The general theory is that they were planted & then manipulated to grow in a curved manner to build things such as ships or even furniture.

I think it was the aliens, though.

We get back in the car, and decide to at least use the GPS to get us to Szczecin (even though we'll have to use our handwritten directions once we actually get in the city).

The GPS won't turn on. The screen is frozen. Ugh. This happens sometimes (it's an old GPS) - all we have to do is take out the memory card for a few seconds, then put it back in & turn the unit back on. Then we'll be good to go.

Except that doesn't work this time. The screen is still frozen.

Damnation.

There is a reset button on the back (where you have to use a paperclip to poke the little hole). I get the bright idea to reset the damn thing.

And it works! The screen is no longer frozen, and it reboots just fine.

Except now it's asking for us to enter an ID#.

SHITBALLS!!! We bought this GPS used, and it didn't come with any of the software or paperwork (it was only $30, so we didn't complain).

You know what that means? We were the proud new owners of a $30 hunk of plastic. It was a completely unusable GPS unit. We were stuck in the middle of a crooked forest in Poland with no GPS and no map (yes, mom, I know we're always supposed to have a map with us...obviously that didn't happen...).

Whatever, we were headed to a mall in Szczecin (cheap parking), so we decided we'd just pick up a new GPS (hopefully we could find one that was cheap, had an 'English' option, and didn't need to be hooked up to a computer before we were able to use it).

So, we start driving to Szczecin using my hand written instructions.

Good googly-moogly, was it difficult. Not so much because the directions weren't good - but it was so hard to follow the street names. I can't speak Polish! I can't even DECIPHER Polish! I have no comprehension of that language, and I don't even understand the letters they use. Zcyyczzcyc is NOT a word that I know (ok, to be fair, I'm pretty sure that's not even a real Polish word - but that's how all the words looked like to me!).

Szczecin isn't a small town, either - it's population is half a million people. It's also not a fun town to drive in. As soon as we crossed the border into Poland, we noticed that the autobahn etiquette we were used to in Germany went RIGHT out the window. No more passing only on the left. No more paying attention to speed limits. No more letting people over.

I manage to follow my handwritten instructions pretty closely. Until we got right into the town. Then I was just lost. Then Josh got mad at me for not following my own instructions and telling him where to turn. How the hell am I supposed to figure out if that street just said, "Zyyzoxy" or Zyzyoxy"? Nope. Not working.

Like I said, our first plan was to go to the mall. There are two main malls in Szczecin - the Galaxy & the Kaskada. Our plan was to park at Galaxy, hang out at the mall for a bit, then explore the town. Poland is really cheap, and $1 = 3 Polish Zloty. We could park all day at the mall for $5. The Galaxy was also having a Christmas market - and I realllly wanted to check out a Polish Christmas market. Then, we were going to walk down to the National Musuem, hang out on the main promenade (Waly Chrobrego), and walk down to the Pomeranian Duke's Castle.

Well, things just didn't happen how I planned them to happen. We got lost heading to The Galaxy. But, we turned the corner & found the Kaskada mall! Well, at least we can go in there and find an information desk, or free wifi, or even an electronics store so we could buy a GPS. We circled the building several times trying to find parking. We entered one parking garage, but it was actually the loading docks for the mall...oops. Finally, we manage to find a garage. Thank Zeus, because I don't think Josh could have handled driving in that city any longer. The pedestrians wouldn't even wait to find a crosswalk, and the drivers were just as terrible.

We went into the mall, and walked around a little bit. It was fine. It was a mall. The mall map showed that they had free wifi, but our iPad never connected. But, THANKFULLY, we found a Saturn!!! (that's an electronics store) We were a little nervous to ask for help. Every single Polish person we saw had a grumpy look on their face. All of them. But, we did end up talking to a few of the Saturn employees, even though they looked like they wanted to die from grumpiness. As soon as we talked to them, though - they all got big smiles on their faces and were SO HELPFUL!!! We talked to three different Grumpy Gus', and they all ended up to be just really nice people. So, a word of advice - don't judge the Grumpy Pole by his face.

We managed to find a good GPS for about $120. YAY!!! We both breathed a huge sigh of relief. Josh wanted a snack before we headed out to the next mall, so we stopped at the food court. (again - grumpy looking McDonald's worker ends up to be really smily and helpful once he started talking with her)

We got back to the car, hooked up the GPS, and headed out to the Galaxy mall. Getting out of the garage was a mess, and we still have an orange imprint of a parking meter on the front of our car as a souvenir. :/

We're driving to the other mall, and the streets are just not fun in this city. It's confusing, and drivers seem to just take traffic lights as a suggestion - the pedestrians think they're invincible, because they take all lights as a suggestion as well.

Driving along, we see the other mall in the distance. Yay! As we're driving, a swarm of pedestrians start crossing the road in front of us. We still have no idea what light they were looking at. There was no traffic light for us, and we just have no clue what they were watching - but they had to have been following something, because they all went at once.

Well, Josh didn't really notice all of the pedestrians crossing as quickly as I noticed them. That's the benefit of being a passenger in a moving car...you tend to notice scary shit a split second before the driver. I start yelling at Josh to "STOP THE FUCKING CAR". He does. In the middle of the crosswalk. We are surrounded by VERY angry Poles...several of whom are yelling at us. Josh is holding his hands up, staring straight ahead, and yelling, "HOLY FUCK, I ALMOST KILLED 50 PEOPLE!!!" (yes, he was exaggerating a bit...but, he was freaked out, so I don't blame him)

Josh manages to come to, and we continue on...two seconds later, we were in the Galaxy parking garage. Three seconds later, we both started breathing again. Five seconds later, we started recovering from our heart attacks.

At this point, it's already almost 2pm, and we've done fuck-all that we wanted to.

BUT, we were at the correct mall, so things had to start looking up, right?

:/

First things first - the Polish Christmas market. I was really excited about it. I saw pictures online of last year's market, and it looked pretty cool!

Those pictures were lies. The booths were crap. All five of them.

Courtney is really cranky at this point. Josh is still having trouble breathing.

Fine, fuck it, we still have a lot of walking around & exploring to do. We decide to leave the mall & head out to the museum and the main promenade. Well, I wasn't really paying attention to which direction we needed to go from the mall. We walked in circles for a little while...finally we asked a local to point us in the direction of the museum. Of course it was in the exact opposite direction of where we were walking.

Ugh, we had a long way to go. Really, only about 1km, but it was SO FLIPPIN' COLD outside. But, we couldn't come all this way & not see what we came to see, right?

The backside of the National Museum. And a tractor convention, apparently.

We were two unhappy campers. It was cold. I had blisters. We were cranky. Nothing seemed to work out. We got to the museum, but at this point it was 4pm, and we just didn't feel like checking it out. We walked along the main street a little bit, but...bah, humbug. That's the only way I could describe my feelings at the time.

At least we look somewhat cute when we're freezing our asses off.

I knew there was a bar somewhere around the museum. We really wanted to try some Polish beer. And, beer makes everything better, right? (spoken like a true alcoholic)

Sure enough - we found the Colorado Pub. It was actually a really cute pub. It was all decked out in the Polish take on cowboys & Indians. I loved all of the totem poles decorating the place - clearly a Colorado thing. ;)

It was really nice to be able to sit in a warm place, though. And the beer was SO CHEAP! I found out I really like Polish beer. We each had two 0.5L beers, and our total came to around $8. Word.

As nice as it was to sit & relax in the warm pub, we had to be going. It was already dark, and we still wanted to run into the grocery store inside the mall.

Back to the cold. Oy. At least neither of us was cranky anymore!

We ran into Real (a grocery store) inside the mall & picked up snacks & cheap beer to take home. We ended up using our very last zloty (the Polish money) on parking. Boo! I like to keep at least a few coins from places we visit. Oh well.

It took us an hour and forty-five minutes to get back to the hotel. At that point, I was STARVING!! Josh had that snack at the food court, but I hadn't eaten anything except breakfast & a handful of chips in the car. We didn't feel like going out to eat, so we just got some to-go pizza from an Italian place near our hotel.

I can't believe I ate the whole thing.

But, I did. And, it was good. And, I don't regret eating the whole thing. So there.

We probably got back to our hotel, with food, around 8:30pm or 9pm. It had been a long day too, and as soon as we ate, we crashed.

I didn't even get up for breakfast the next morning (Josh won't pass up free food, so he did go eat).

We left Berlin that morning, unfortunately. :/ There had been snow in the interior of Germany while we had been in the city, and the drive back was a little slower. But, we hit NO traffic! It was awesome! It still took us a good 7 hour drive to get home, but still..no traffic.

Even though we didn't have the greatest time in Poland, our trip to Berlin was SO AWESOME! We loved the city, and definitely want to go back.

And, here's our rundown:

Josh's favorite part of the trip: walking the streets of Berlin
Courtney's favorite: Christmas markets!!! and the self-guided walk
Josh's least favorite: driving in Poland
Courtney's least favorite: trying to write Polish

Next time: we'll do the museums on Museum Island, and tour Charlottenburg