On Monday I talked about my trip to Gdańsk and I said I’d talk about Sopot today. Well, here we go. In short, I went straight to Sopot from the airport for a trip out on a pirate ship and then went to Gdańsk.
Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia are three separate cities – or perhaps towns is a better description of Sopot and Gdynia – which together form “the Tri-City”. Gdańsk is obviously the big city and the big draw, Gdynia started life as a pleasant village and is now a brisk and business-like seafront town (I didn’t visit Gdynia, so I can’t confirm but that’s what my guidebook says) and Sopot is a beach resort. At this stage, I can’t remember what drew me to Sopot – why do you want to go to a beach resort in November?? – but I did, so let’s just go with it. My guidebook recommends the local museum and some fried fish places and neither of those would draw me to the place. Maybe the colleague who first raved about Gdańsk mentioned it.
I had a bit of fun figuring out the right trains. The ticket machines can be put into English but the trains are very much Polish and I had no idea that all the stations in the Gdańsk area had different names with “Gdańsk-” at the beginning of them and therefore no idea which one I wanted to go to or which train would go there, so it took longer to get to Sopot than I intended. Once you arrive, however, Sopot is very easy to navigate.
I walked down to the beach, straight past some really interesting buildings. I have no idea what the architectural style is but interesting sums it up. There were the yellowish buildings with turrets and orange domes, there was the big glass frontage and most importantly, there was the wobbly building – maybe that’s what PK recommended and the reason I went. Its name is Krzywy Domek, The Crooked House, and it’s part of the Rezydent shopping centre. It has a Costa Coffee on the ground floor and so it looks like the most dramatic coffee shop I’ve ever seen. Definitely worth making a detour from Gdańsk for. I also noticed that people were sweeping up all the fallen autumn leaves. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but this is a thing in central and eastern Europe. It’s my abiding memory of Kyiv, the way all the golden leaves were swept up (except the ones the kids made lions’ manes out of), they did it in Russia too, in Finland and in Poland. It looks nice and tidy and clearly people are taking care of their town but on the other hand, leaf mulch is good for trees and parks and hedges and you don’t want to tidy up every single one.
Anyway, onwards to the beach. It’s a nice stretch of golden sand and I can well imagine in the summer that this is packed, with tourists and locals alike. In November… well, the sand looked slightly damp and very cold. The Baltic was blue enough and so was the sky but you just didn’t want to go for a dip. I did want to walk along the pier, though. In fact, even better, I wanted a ride on the pirate ship!
It’s not actually a pirate ship although its name is Statek Pirat (Google Translate tells me this is just Polish for Pirate Ship) and its logo is a skull and crossbones. Their website is quite vague about what the ship actually is. The tall ship I went for a trip on in Croatia is a reproduction of a 16th century merchant ship. This one.. well, all I can say is that it also has a motor engine and sails without sails. The cruise must have lasted about 40 minutes and we basically just sailed out from the pier for 20 minutes and then sailed back – again, dubious use of the word “sailed” here.
It’s an interesting looking ship because although its planks are dark brown, all its railings are bright red and blue and there’s a lot of ornate gold around the portholes. It’s fun but it doesn’t add to the air of authenticity in the least. Looking at the photos, it looks exactly like you’d expect a pirate cruise at Legoland to look. Still, a boat trip is a boat trip and a boat with three masts and a long prow and a figurehead hanging off the front is a fun thing to do your boat trip on.
Was it fun? No. I absolutely froze. For some reason, I decided that for my long weekend alongside the Baltic – and let’s remind ourselves again that we use the word Baltic as a synonym for “really flipping cold!!” – I wouldn’t bother taking an actual coat. I had a kind of fleece-lined shacket, a red checked shirt-like jacket that I apparently thought would be plenty warm enough. Maybe it was warm enough for walking around Gdańsk, and to be fair to me, I don’t remember being freezing once I was back on solid land, but it wasn’t warm enough to take to the ocean. The pictures are all of me huddled up with gloves on and the hood pulled tight looking miserable. Oh, two hoods! I’m wearing a reddish-purple “thermal hoodie” underneath, this being Marks & Spencer’s idea of “thermal”. It’s warm enough for general use, especially when combined with the fleece thing but it absolutely was not warm enough on the pirate ship.
So off we went for our little adventure, sailing out into the Baltic on our wooden tall pirate ship, getting our noses and fingers ripped off by the freezing breeze, feeling the unnatural sensation of an engine puttering away underneath us and then we turned and came back. Very pleasant. Honestly, if you’ve got warm enough clothes, I’d highly recommend it. I’d do it again in an instant. But I wanted to warm up so I didn’t die of hypothermia on my way into Gdańsk so I stopped at the restaurant on the pier and had a hot chocolate. Yes, it would have been infinitely better to find somewhere indoors for this hot chocolate but I sat outside. I don’t remember whether I had any choice in the matter, whether there even was any indoor seating. There was a Costa a couple of hundred metres away! If you want to get warm and drink something kind of revolting, why sit outside on the pier when you know there’s a chain coffee shop nearby?? And it was a bit of a revolting hot chocolate. For a start, it was covered in whipped cream and I can’t abide whipped cream. Ask my mum to tell you the colourful story of the time I accidentally ate some cream in my jelly when I was a toddler. So I scraped it all off and left it in my saucer, which looked even more revolting. The hot chocolate itself was the kind that’s both watery and oily at the same time, the kind that has never seen milk or anything like it but at least it was warm.
And that was it for my trip to Sopot in the depths of winter. The wobbly house, a cold beach, a freezing pirate ship trip and a grim hot chocolate. I would bet Sopot is a delight in summer. It’s a short trip from Gdańsk, it’s got gorgeous golden sand and a pier and boat trips and an interesting town which its people take pride in looking after. But in November, it was cold.
