The hostel was a hovel. Nothing matched how it had been advertised / the photos they put up online. For starters, the 3-bed arrangement with one bed on a mezzanine with private kitchen and bath in a spacious room turned out to be a bunk bed contraption with barely three inches between the third bed and a kitchen / bath / toilet situation shared between four rooms, which all constituted the “Bristol apartment.” It stank to high heaven – as one person in our group put it – “like instant soup with bad cheese” and gave off a claustrophobic vibe, the kind that ends up seeping into your mind and locking you into your own intrusive thoughts. A fact unmitigated by the trip around the yard to the reception in order to retrieve our key. 

The reception point – difficult to find in the labyrinth of backyard buildings, despite the map on the main entrance to the hovel – also doubled as reception to the gym, a gym that made prison workout spaces appear lacking. All in all it served four “objects,” each as depressing a hostel as the converted psychiatric hospital we were in, despite their English names, and nowhere near “within easy distance to the city center” as had been advertised. Unless you drove a car or counted the arrangement of buildings, a supermarket and a convenience store as some sort of city center. The “Institute of Polonial Preservation” there to “conserve the historical and social culture of Poland” was an added extra to the new moon atmosphere. 

The town itself was beautiful and magical, and so the opposite of where we were staying that crossing the river into the center made you feel as though you were crossing into another reality, which in so many ways, I’m sure it was. Even though it was already dark, you could get a good feel for it, between the old buildings and the newer constructions. There were still people milling about, which was perhaps not overly typical for the time of night and the size of the town in general. It valued knowledge, that much was clear in how it preserved its first university and added on others, including the modern facilities embedded in even more with-the-times buildings, some of which were EU funded, others existing through the grace of private sources. Even at night, driving through the side we were living on which had no tourist attractions it could boast of it was very obvious that this was a city well worth exploring, and I for one could not wait to start exploring in the daylight. Clearly I was not alone with that. Judging by the reaction as we drove to the restaurant we’d chosen, there was at least one other person in the car who was equally eager to look around. 

The restaurant itself was amazing. Since there were three of us and we were staying for three days, we decided that each person would get to choose a restaurant for the day. This came after we’d all buried our noses in Google Maps to see what we could find for that night that was within easy driving distance. And by that we meant getting there before hunger beat us. It was a good thing too, because when we returned to the (former) asylum, ready to wind down for the night, we found out that the heating couldn’t be turned down. Outside it was way below freezing – the kind of weather that evokes pictures of snowclad fields and trees against a crispy blue, cloudless sky – while the inside of our room would have made every hardened sauna troll proud with no way of turning down the heat as key elements needed for that particular operation were broken and no way to open the window all night lest we wanted to wake up as icicles with our chests submitting to the same fate as our bodies.

Disclaimer. None of the pictures featured in this trilogy are from the town we were in, which won’t be disclosed here in order to preserve the privacy of the third traveler. They were, however, taken at the little village where we were picked up by car after making our way there by train and getting fleeced by the conductors due to circumstances completely out of our control. A lot of things on the trip were like that, especially if they could be linked back to this small village. And still we decided to go back there and change our luck around. We’ll see how that works out.