june #2, mazury #1
Mazury - the Lakes District, for Academy of Physical Education (AWF) sailing camp. Oh yeah. My Stryjek Sławek (the other one! I only have two. Wujek is an uncle on the mother’s side, and Stryjek is an uncle on the father’s side) runs the camp and has been going there for many, many, many years. Twenty, maybe? In any case, at the AWF, all students have to do practical sessions during classes, and they also have to attend one water sports and one winter sports camp. My cousin Julita and I decided to visit our mutual godfather and ended up at a camp where there were about 60 men and 15 women (including staff and us). Very even division of the testosterone there. In any case, we left Warszawa on the 14th for a week of lazing about in the sun and wandering through the countryside. The photos may bore you, but I had such a wonderful time there.
We got there very late on the 14th, and the camp started the next day. We bunked up in cabin #4. Cosy, huh? I’m on the right, she’s on the left, and the vague outline of a square that you can see out the window is our godfather’s cabin. Not that he was trying to keep an eye on us, or anything.
Our view.
More of our view. That building is the hotel - the campgrounds consist of a hotel which also houses classrooms, the dining hall, and the drinks terrace. The students can live either in the hotel or in cabins like ours, which dot the landscape in the rest of the area. The bathrooms for the cabins are in the basement of the hotel, next to that driveway. The cabins and hotel are set up on a hill, then there’s a slope down to the port at the lakeside, and in front of my Stryjek’s cabin, it slopes down to a parking lot, bonfire area, and volleyball court. Remember all that? There’ll be a test later.
Julka and I went for a walk to the nearest ‘shops’, a holiday hotel a few kilometres down the road. We passed many fields on the way.
When we got back, it started to pour down rain. I mean, pour. Storms and horrible things for hours and hours. In fact, there was a power outage in the entire camp - so everyone whipped out their torches and waited. We attempted to do some sort of weird mirror-light-reflection-equals-brightness thing, which didn’t work at all, but at least we tried. But, we failed. So, under the beautiful lighting, Julka pulled out the vodka in true Polish style.
So that was Day 1. Day 2 was us getting to know the place and ice cream in town with Stryjek.
Look at that lovely sunlight.
Cabin #5-6, and Julka standing in front of #4 with #3 on the left. See that bench in front of our cabin, there on the right? On the very first day, a guy who was obviously one of the trainers walked past and accused us of taking it from in front of his cabin (#6), where it had been the year before. We denied it, because we actually hadn’t taken it, but there you go - drama! And on our first day, too.
Let’s just say Julka hates me for taking these photos.
Town, Giżycko.
Julka hanging out the back of our cabin.
Stryjek’s cabin and table; the view down to the volleyball court, parking lot, bonfire area. Lake to the right.
View down into port.
One of the paths leading down to port; our glorious blue cabin.
We got a few visits from random boys in the camp on the first day, actually: they came by in the morning, introduced themselves and acted all suave because they assumed we were students they didn’t know yet. When we didn’t show up at their activities all day they came by again in the evening to find out whether we were the nurses. Ooh la la for us, I suppose. Julka immediately hit them with the, “I have a boyfriend!” stick, while I stood by and laughed. We made a few random friends this way, so in the evening we sat on the drinks terrace for a long while - where we made more friends. All guys, of course, because that boy to girl ratio was ridiculous. So that was a fun evening.
The next day, the 17th, we had perfect weather. After breakfast I left Julka tanning in port where the boys were about to start their lifesaving lessons and headed off on a bike ride through the local fields and villages.
Stork! They’re good luck, you know.
Stork’s nest in a village.
Opium! I mean poppies. Aren’t they beautiful?
That evening Julka decided we ought to go to the drinks terrace again (boyfriend or no, she’d developed a crush. And, of course, so had I) and so we went. No one was really around and I wasn’t particularly in the mood, but as she finished her beer, the guy who accused us of stealing his bench joined us, bringing two other trainers with him. One of the men who sat down was the man who made the bench, Darek. The guy who accused us of theft was Boguś. The third man, who was very into literature, was Michal. Two minutes into conversation, Bogus asked me where I was from, and when I said Australia, he asked what I had to do with that Dominik guy from Australia that had been there two years earlier. I told him it was my brother and we instantly bonded. Yay.
They bought us another beer or two and we talked and played table tennis until ‘lights out’ at 11. They invited us to Boguś’s birthday gathering the next night, down near the volleyball courts, and we agreed. So that was our third full day and it went rather well, actually.
Continued…