Tag Archives: Gdansk Bus Station

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning!

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

23 April 2024 ~ Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning!

Note (added 9 May 2024): Booking.com asked me several times to leave a review of my ‘hotel room experience’. It was a tad difficult, as I never got inside of it, but, anyway, I left a review. When I checked the reviews on Booking.com’s page for Tawerna Rybaki, I found mine via the link, but when I checked again using their ‘slider’ on the page, only positive reviews appeared. So, it’s ‘magnificent’, ‘wonderful’, ‘the best ever’ … as I intimate in my post headline, “a warning to the unwary”. Perhaps I should have included the word ‘collusion’ 🤔

This story is sad but true. Its main protagonists are the world’s largest online travel agency, a so-called ‘apartment’ in Gdansk and last, but by all means least ~ or so it would seem ~ me, the customer.

A few weeks ago, I was returning from the UK to Kaliningrad. As you will know if you have read my earlier post, the journey is an onerous one: early morning, 4am start; Wizz Air to Gdansk; taxi to Gdansk bus station; three hours of loitering in Gdansk waiting for the bus connection; two-hour bus journey to the Polish-Russian borders; one-and-a-half-hours processing time at the borders (if you are lucky); forty-five minute journey to Kaliningrad.

“I know,” I thought, in an excited moment of uncharacteristic exhilaration, “I’ll break the journey up. I’ll stay overnight in Gdansk and catch the bus to Kaliningrad refreshed the following morning. What a spiffing idea!”

Intoxicated (it’s those English ales, you know!) by the cunningness of my plan, specifically the chance it would avail me of spending an afternoon sight-seeing around Gdansk Old Town and thereafter a relaxed evening dining out in a restaurant of my choice, I was on Google before you could say ‘you will only end up on Booking.com’, and two minutes later, having keyed ‘Hotels in Gdansk’ into the browser, there I was, on Booking.com.

Now Gdansk, like any other large tourist city, is not short of a hotel or two, and before I could apply one of the many Booking.com filters, I had been directed to the most expensive hotels in the city. My stay was an out-of-season booking, when £120+ seemed a tad extravagant for crashing out for the night. The in-season prices, or rather open season on gullible punters’ bank accounts, are beyond a profligate’s dream.

Screenshots from hotel-booking websites taken on, appropriately, April Fool’s Day, 2 April 2024 (April Fool!), show that the in-season prices for almost all accommodation in Gdansk has trebled. If you are a real mug, you can even pay in excess of £600 a night just to slide between the sheets.

I personally, could never justify paying anything like that, even if I had a name like Elon Muskrat, after all a bed’s a bed, and unless you’ve got a nice bit of totty with you and don’t mind being sexist by saying so, what’s the point of stumping up more dosh than you would if you accidently went to a brothel. And you would; wouldn’t you!

No, I was looking for somewhere perhaps not exactly as cheap as chips or for the price of a shish kebab from fatty Abdul’s burger bar, but at least pegged at a price so that I would not cry come the morning after, “They should really invent a pill for this! Oh why, oh why did I open my wallet last night!”

Applying Booking.com’s filters, but sparingly (one can have quite enough of a silly thing), their search engine unearthed several hotels that accorded with my budget and requirements, namely rooms at 40 to 60 pounds a night and a hotel in easy walking distance of the city’s bus station. Clapped-out, Gdansk bus station is the hole in the crown where the jewel never was, and so say all of us.

Within seconds I was faced with a series of affordable options, including something that I had never used before, rentable apartments. Apartment is such a wonderful word, is it not? It certainly beats ‘flat’ or ‘bedsit’ or a single room with no hotel lobby and no staff on hand to help you out in the unlikely event that something goes wrong, and some of these apartments in Gdansk, when taken out of season, are as cheap as the paper we used to wrap chips in before the EU ruled that we couldn’t.

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

Always one for adventure ~ I bought a new cravat last week ~ I latched onto an interesting place, the exotic name of which, appealing photographs and exquisite reviews plastered over the net were surely too good to be true. Let me just repeat that, ‘Too good to be true!’

The place in question, and I had no question to ask, after all wasn’t I about to book this ‘apartment’ via one of the net’s most acclaimed online accommodation booking sites, Booking.com, was called Tawerna Rybaki Old Town. I repeat: Tawerna Rybaki Old Town.

“Let’s do it!” I said, saying it out loud, as if somebody else was with me, a party to my decision. There’s confidence for you!

And by Jove, I did it!

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town

At 39 quid for the night, and as Booking.com’s receipts rolled into my email inbox (and don’t they just!), I do not mind admitting, I was feeling rather smug. But that was because at that point in time I assumed I was all booked up, rather than being something else that inconveniently rhymes with that phrase.

A couple of days rolled by (I probably went to the pub in between.), when, for some inexplicable reason, possibly prompted by that fate-tempting phrase, ‘in the unlikely event that something should go wrong’, I returned to my booking receipt.

It was all looking self-explanatory, until I spotted something that I thought was rather odd.

In a box within the tabulation, a third of the way down the page, a statement appeared in English ~ ‘A door code is needed’ ~ and beneath it a longer sentence, but this was written in Polish. I copied the sentence in Polish and pasted it into Google’s translator, but it did not tell me anything that I did not already not know, such as where was the code that was needed?

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

I searched through the plethora of booking receipts but found nowt. So, I emailed the apartment owners using the email link on the form and left it at that. Two days passed ~ nothing. I emailed again, ensuring that my second email was flagged ‘urgent’. As before, I received no reply.

It was surely time to get in touch with Booking.com and ask for clarification. If only life was as easy as it was before the internet!

Booking.com ~ Is there anybody there?👻

Booking.com had sent three or four automated emails to me regarding my booking, none of which, as far as I could see, contained their contact information.

A Google search for Booking.com’s telephone number or a live chat option unearthed several dud numbers and no live chat.

With a sense of intense foreboding, fuelled by déjà vu (we’ve all been here on the net), I turned to their website — nothing.

“Perhaps,” I mused, “they want me to open an account so that they can fill my email inbox with a load of shitey ads.” I was already running out of time and patience, so I placed my trust in my email spam box and signed up as they wanted.

And here is where the nightmare truly began. Next stop the Twilight Zone.

We all know, or should know from hard and frustrating experience, that many, far too many, online-only trading companies, large, exclusive and monopolistic, demonstrate unparalleled expertise in the art of concealing their contact details.

The irony of this is that we are supposedly living in the so-called information age; communication made easy!

Booking.com are by no means the only organisation whose website is constructed like a maze, with lots of circuitous paths, junctions and dead ends guaranteed to flummox anyone impudent or desperate enough to try to speak to someone or message a real human entity, something preferably in human form, possessing eyes, ear holes, a voice, and maybe even a brain, with which to reply to queries.

I appreciate, of course, that Booking.com is an aggravator, sorry, I meant to say aggregator, and as such does not want to encourage every Tom, Dick and Ikmar to swamp the lady at customer support with a lot of unnecessary questions. But when accommodation proprietors who have already taken your dough shun your attempts to contact them, then, to quote the telephone ad of old, it really is “nice to talk”.

The slideshow below illustrates how well hidden Booking.com’s contact details are. Apologies for the ‘misty’ images, but symbolically speaking they capture perfectly the obscurantism encountered in searching for what could and should be a simple highlighted click away, ie ‘Contact Customer Support’.

Booking.com: Welcome to the Help Centre
Booking.com:Fill in the booking details
Booking.com: How to open the next window?
Booking.com: You must type in something, ie 'Key'. Click on 'Other topics' at the end of the list.
Booking.com: Click on 'Something else'.
Booking.com: Click on ‘More Options’
Booking.com: There's the Contact options: fingers crossed!!!
Booking.com: Believe it or not ...

As soon as you are directed to ‘Please read our FAQs’ (Frequently Asked Quackery), you can be sure that you are dealing with a company that will stop at nothing to thwart your outrageous ambition to speak to someone human. Rest assured, that you will never find what you are looking for by reading FAQs — an abbreviation that should be changed under the Trades Description Act to reflect what it actually stands for. I suggest FKUs.

Finding the means by which to communicate directly with Booking.com requires the patience of Gungadin ~ perhaps it was he who designed the site. “Hello, can I speak to Mister Mykel Hart, please…” to be said in a sing-songy Asian voice.

But, as it applied to my experience, there was no one there to talk to, not from India, from Pakistan not even from Asian Leicester.

I had signed up to Booking.com; I had spun the internet roulette wheel: round and around and around we go, where we’ll end up nobody knows.

Having entered an Edgar Allan Poe nightmare world, I eventually find a link to the ‘HELP (for Pity’s Sake Help Me, Somebody!) Centre!!!!’ But it does not end there!

I click on the Help Centre link and am taken to a Welcome to the Help Centre window. ‘Send us a message’ or ‘Call us’ does not take you anywhere. The options are to ‘Sign into your account’ or ‘Continue without an account’. I had already had a brief whizz around the signed-in account and had whizzed out of it again, having found nothing that I wanted and lots of what I could do without, so I decided to plump for the ‘Continue without an account’ option.

I am then asked to fill in my booking details, which I did with gratitude.

The next window asks: ‘How can we help?’ Beneath this there is a whole list of fob-off things that you do not want help with. But no visible means by which to talk to or to message someone. So, I click on ‘More’, which is at the bottom of the list. Note, however, that in order not to go around and around and around on the seemingly never-ending carousel, you must type something in the search box, even if it is only ‘arseholes!’ I refrained and typed in ‘key’.

In the next window the name and dates of my apartment appeared with a little picture next to it, and below this another lost, sorry, I meant to type ‘list’, headed ‘Things you can do’, which looked very much the same as the list two pages back, except, perhaps, for the option ‘Please Commit Suicide, which was not included, since the site designer was no doubt convinced that by the time you reached this window you would instinctively want to jump out of it.

Not wanting to oblige, I clicked instead on ‘Other topic’ at the end of the list (where else?!). The last of three options in this list was the intentionally vague, ‘Something else’. Heaven forbid that they might indicate that this was where you might find a telephone number or a messaging option.

Are you still with me at this point? I know the feeling!

The next window was called ‘Get in touch!’

“Yu don’t say!!’

But the recommended option was to contact the owners of the property. This was an absolute ‘No No’, as I had already received no replies to two emails and did not want a third.

So, we click on ‘More contact options’.

Once again, the drowning man instead of getting a life raft is thrown a straw, as you are siphoned off again down the dead-end direction of the never-answering property owners. But here, at last, is a chance to communicate. You’ve ducked and dived and weaved and woven and at last more by luck than design you find yourself at the core of the puzzle. The options open to you are to telephone customer service or send them a type-written message. I opted for the latter, as I wanted them to respond in writing.

And so it was, having travelled in my mind to the very antipodes of Distress and Despair, I wrote:

“I note in my booking there is reference to a key code to access the property. However, it is not clear whether there will be someone at the property to provide this code, or if the code should have been included in the booking confirmation. I have contacted the property twice by email for clarification, but they have not replied. Please advise.”

I did get a response. I wondered if I would. But I wasn’t convinced. Here it was stated that the owners of Twanky Dillo apartment would send me by telephone or email the entry code for the apartment on the morning of my booking. I did not like it, but I left it like that. ‘Don’t hold your breath!’ was the maxim that sprang to mind.

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town

Now, I’m not the world’s most cynical guy … but, come the day, there I was, extremely tired after my early-morning flight, standing in this beautiful, aged-like-a-fine-wine street in Gdansk’s Old Town, having just been deposited by an airport taxi, the driver of which confessed that even using his sat-nav, he was having trouble locating the address that I had given him ~ the address of my lovely apartment.

Let me reiterate the name of that apartment and the apartment’s address in case you have missed my previous references:

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

There I stood with my laptop case in hand, a weary traveller in Old Town Gdansk.

And a more enchanting, bohemian street you could not wish to be standing in. Now, all that was needed was to find your room, deposit your case, freshen up and sightsee until you drop. Little did I know that I would walk … and walk … and walk, but devoid of all enjoyment, and by the end of the day I would be more than ready to drop.

Not comfortable still ~ I am a pragmatic pessimist ~ I strolled slowly up the street peering at the property numbers, more than certain that I would not find the apartment I was looking for. And would you Adam and Eve it, there was a 7/8, and next to it an 11/12, but as for 9/10 it was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they forgot to rebuild it after Hitler blew it up?

I will not say that I did not believe it. I did believe it, but wished to be proven wrong. I walked that same stretch of street three times, as though by doing so the missing numbers would miraculously make themselves known to me, but no such luck and more of the same eventually had me pop inside a café and ask the people therein if they knew the mysterious whereabouts of mislaid numbers 9 to10.

Nice people but no idea. They suggested I try the alley next door.

This little street fanned out into a wide rectangle with flats on either side, but number 9/10 was not among them. I walked to the end of the street and back again, but, as the song goes, on completion of this exercise ‘I still hadn’t found what I was looking for’.

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

I retraced my steps, peered up and down the street that traversed the one I was walking, and then, none the wiser, returned to the café where I had asked directions before.

It may strike you as strange, but the café people did not know any more than they did 20 minutes previously.

Over another coffee, I tried to telephone the apartment which did not exist and whose owners never reply to their customers, but my O₂ roaming was roaming somewhere else, and the café had no wireless internet with which to connect my laptop. As I said earlier, we expect too much; this is the age of communication. Now, had there been a telephone box …

But this would not have helped either. Four or five streets later (I had begun looking for alternative accommodation), somehow I manged to make a phone call, but the number for apartment Twanky Wanky returned the message, ‘unrecognised’. So, their email is unmanned, and their phone number is a false one.

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

By now, I had drunk three more coffees in as many cafes, none of which had wireless internet, neither customer toilets, and this, the latter, let me tell you, is a real problem in Zloty land: public loos are few and far between and when you do eventually find one, if indeed you do, you either pay up or pee yourself.

As I trudged moodily through the very streets that I thought I would enjoy, my laptop bag crammed with presents, which made it all the heavier, I wondered if I was the victim of a cynical and sadistic trick that had me following signs to the loo only to be taken around and around in circles. Perhaps the loo signs were Booking.com sponsored and soon I would come to FAQs?

As luck would have it, I remembered the subterranean bogs on the little side street where I was told Twinky Winky apartment might be, so I detoured back there, disturbed the female bog attendant who was sucking on a fag (ah, hem), gratefully used the loo and upon emerging from it, happened to cast a glance into a gated compound, and guess what it was I saw there locked away and hidden? Yes, you’ve got it right: the elusive numbers 9/10. This astonishing discovery, as elucidating as it was, mattered not a jot, since I neither had the code which would allow me to access the gated compound or the code for the door of the property.

F.ck! F.ck! F.ck!

All I wanted now was to find a hotel, dump my case and secure a room for the night. I was exhausted; bear in mind that I had been up since 4am and had undergone the cattle-market of travelling discount airways.

I wanted a hotel desperately, but I was not prepared to pay silly money, even in my beleaguered state.

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

A young lady in a bar (where else!) after telling me that I looked much younger than I was (I told her I used Buttocks.) offered to put me up for the night (I think that’s what she said?) for nothing. But as I am rather fussy about who it is I get mugged by, I politely declined her offer, and me and my trusty laptop took to the streets again.

In another bar, I met a young lady (I don’t make a habit of this … Trust me, I’m an antique dealer), who would have been speaking perfect English if she could lose her American accent. She sympathised with my plight. “Have you been had?” she asked. “Well, not recently and not as much I’d like,” I Frankie Howard replied (for the edification of deprived millennials, Frankie was a camp comedian). She then asked me where I was going, and when I replied Kaliningrad, an ominous hush fell over the bar. She then treated me to a diatribe about Russia and the Russians, before admitting that she wasn’t too fond of most of western Europe either, and couldn’t stand the globalists. But she had been drinking all night long and had the very English female habit of saying F.ck! a lot.

Having enjoyed my brief encounter with Miss F.ckalot, off I trudged, completely in the wrong direction to the one in which I wanted to go, but with the applaudable compensation that I ended up on the historic side of the river.

The sky was a complementary blue and the air crisp with the first flirtation of spring. As tired as I was, I made time to make love to the scenery. I even unzipped my camera. But I shied away from the top-price hotels with their fancy names and liveried doormen.

Swish hotel in Gdansk. Not Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk

There are very few places in the world as distressing as the immediate area that borders Gdansk’s bus station, and it was quite far on foot for a senior citizen who had already spent two hours plodding the cobbled pavements to drag himself to, but I reckoned that close to the bus station there must be a cheap hotel.

I reckoned wrong. There wasn’t. At least a visible one.

I stopped and asked a taxi driver if he knew of a budget hotel? He didn’t. Why should he? He was only a taxi driver. In the golden age of communication an impediment indeed.

I walked and walked, and based on the same hypothesis that travel stations were associated with hotels, ended up at the city’s central railway station. Here, as everywhere else, there was no hotel in sight. But then it happened. The man up there answered my prayers, either that or it pays to advertise. Lit up, like a beacon of hope, white, bright, refulgent and gloriously unmissable, it could have been a mirage but thankfully was not. Two simple but adorable words on top of a high-rise building: here is the ‘Mercure Hotel’, they said.

Locked out of Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk, the Hotel Mercure should be called Haven Hotel!

Mercure Hotel Gdansk Website

With blisters on my feet and soul, I hopped into the nearest taxi and dismissing as a fait accompli the taxi driver ripping me off, 10 Euros for a four-minute trip, I asked the delightful man, whom my feet regarded as their saviour, to part the waters of my discontent and take me to the Mercure.

Could it have been the height of the Mercure or its grand, perpetual revolving door that made me think ‘too costly’? This we will never know. But I went in all the same. Went in! I actually just went in! I didn’t need a door code? All I had to do was walk through the open door — the revolving door that never closes — and there was a reception desk and someone there to talk to! Don’t you just love a proper hotel?! Asking the price of a room for a man dead on his feet, the reply came back ‘sixty quid’. Good enough! Job done!

Yes, the electronic door card did not work the lift the first time I tried to use it, no matter how I waggled it! Yes, the toilets were also electronic door-card operated. Yes, the lighting system in the hotel room only came on if one shoved the card in the reader attached to the wall. And yes, wasn’t it all, in spite of this, wasn’t it all so lovely!

My stay at the Mercure, which I would like to write about later, was a blessing and would have been no less so had I not been led a merry dance by the owners of an apartment in Poland, which might have been just the ticket if, after I had paid the tariff, they had simply provided the codes I needed to get me through the door.

Pay heed to my experience. It is a warning to the unwary.

It was bad enough as it was, but imagine how worse it could have been had I not been travelling light! I only had a laptop case, not a 35kg bag!

The moral of this story is, if you are going to run the risk of booking an apartment room instead of a proper hotel, ie a place which has a front desk with staff that you can talk to, make sure you get your key code early. Otherwise, take a burglar with you, a ladder and a battering ram.

Think this is a joke? It’s not so funny when it happens to you!

Tawerna Rybaki Old Clown
Pillock 910, Sodyou, Gdwańks, blank blank, Poland

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

NOTE> Booking.com: Once I had alerted Booking.com to my plight, they were quick to respond to me and quick to issue a refund for the booking, which included the difference between the price of the non-accessible apartment and the cost of a night at Mercure Hotel. I am grateful to them for this.

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

The art, science and agony of waiting: a round trip from Kaliningrad to the UK via Gdansk, Poland

Updated 5 January 2024 | Published: 19 January 2023 ~ Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

In November 2022, my wife Olga and I travelled from Kaliningrad to the UK via Gdansk. It was the first time I had made this journey since the advent of coronavirus.

This account should be read in conjunction with my post How to Get to Kaliningrad from the UK and treated as an addendum to the information contained therein. It is hoped that it may help you to decide whether or not to take this route in the future and what to expect if you do. To be forewarned is to be forearmed ~ not that to be forearmed will do you any good.

Passage to and from the UK to Kaliningrad via Gdansk Airport is, in the post-apocalyptic coronavirus world, now the era of unprecedented sanctions, a realistic if not tedious alternative to the other options available to you. By no means the most traveller-friendly route, nevertheless as an A to B expedient, with a great deal of fortitude and more of patience you will eventually arrive at your destination without incurring the need to navigate every letter in the traveller’s alphabet.

Recently, in November 2022, this was the route we took to travel to the UK. Pre-coronavirus we always took a taxi from Kaliningrad to Gdansk. At a cost of approximately £100, of the two options, bus or taxi, the latter, of course, was the more expensive, but what it lacked in economy it more than made up for in comfort, door-to-door convenience and, most importantly, a smoother, less traumatic transition at the Russian-Polish border.

Our November trip was the first in which I would take a bus from Kaliningrad to Gdansk. Kaliningrad Central Bus Station is a wonderful Soviet incarnation, built, I should imagine, circa 1970s. It is neat, tidy, user-friendly and surrounded by shops and refreshment facilities.

There’s nothing to bussing it from Kaliningrad: You just pass yourself and your luggage through a scanning system, buy your tickets in the usual way from the counter ~ thankfully staff-manned, not machine-oriented ~ and when it is time to catch your bus, brandishing your barcoded ticket, off you go through the gates.

Not one for using minibuses on any journey except in town, I was relieved to find on the day of travelling that we were blessed with a proper coach.

We were required to load our cases into the luggage compartment ourselves, which was no great shakes as we were travelling light. Even so, if you happen to be an old codger suffering from comorbidities or a damsel in distress, you may find that you need to enlist the kindly services of a fellow-travelling Sir Galahad, since loading luggage of any kind does not come under the driver’s remit.

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

The journey to the Russian border in Kaliningrad is an effortless one, taking around 30 to 40 minutes in all. From the other direction, Gdansk Airport, the distance is the greater of the two. But travelling isn’t the problem; it’s the waiting you have to worry about.

Whether you travel by car or by bus, prepare yourself mentally for an indescribably protracted period of boredom at both border checkpoints. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a competition between the Russian and Polish authorities to see who can make your stay at the border more drawn out and uncomfortable. In days gone by, when Russians flocked to Poland to buy sausages and the Polish nipped back and forth to Kaliningrad to smuggle in cheap vodka and fags, crossing from either direction, Russia to Poland, Poland to Russia, was a traffic-queuing nightmare. But at least then it was understandable why it took so long.

Now, in the New Normal ~ in the coronavirus aftermath and knock-on effect from the troubles in Ukraine ~ queues at the border, which is to say magnificent queues, are largely a thing of the past, but interminable waiting is not.

For example, on the day that we travelled, there were two cars in front of us and no one behind us, but still it took four hours to cross from Russia into Poland.

By taxi the process is quicker, not substantially so, but it is quicker and a lot less painful. On both sides of the border, Russian and Polish, our driver would take it upon himself to hand over our passports to the authorities whilst we sat in the car until summoned to appear before the border officer’s window.

This procedure is strangely daunting. It has its equivalent in the unfounded guilt you feel (and I am certain that you do) whenever a copper walks by (“Evenin’ all!”). I find that it both helps and doesn’t if, whilst standing under the border officer’s partly hidden officious eye, you imagine yourself in the leading role of one of Len Deighton’s spy novels.

One other thing, other difference between the taxi and the bus, is that when you take a taxi your bags are checked in the car. A uniformed man or woman with stern features out of a can, asks you to open your bags and then studiously looks at your underpants (hopefully those in the case, not the ones you are wearing!). He, or a colleague, will also bring a dog along to sniff around for drugs (in your cases not your underpants) which, of course, we never have (drugs, that is, not underpants) except, perhaps, if you can call them drugs, a vintage bottle of Bile Beans which, through force of habit as well as nostalgia, I carry for good luck. Get away! You don’t! Do you?

By bus the procedure though similar is far more demanding, obviously because the vehicle you are travelling in contains more people and more people means more documents to process but also because each passenger is required to lug his, her or its own luggage out of the bus, across the tarmac and into a bland and impersonal room.

Here you queue obediently, waiting for the inquisition before the border officer’s cubicle. No smiling, this is serious business, so why on earth do I always feel an uncontrollable urge to laugh? Eternity comes and goes and suddenly stamp, stamp, stamp, they are inking little official things in the pages of your passport. This is music to your ears, for next they will dismiss you, and you’ll suffer to drag your heavy cases across to the waiting conveyor belt in order to have them scanned for all those things that you shouldn’t have stashed, and didn’t stash, inside.

Admittedly, this hiatus in your journey does provide you with the opportunity to pay the bog a visit, making it not entirely a waste of time. The problem is, however, that you can almost guarantee that one or more in your party are either not in possession of the prerequisite travel documents or are carrying something in their bags in contravention of regulations. When this happens, as it did for us, your wait at the border can be delayed to such a frightful extent that by the time you eventually move, you have forgotten what movement was. Thus, do not be surprised if you have read War and Peace from cover to cover, experienced a couple of birthdays and your restless arse is covered in cobwebs by the time the bus starts rolling. Naw, it’s not as bad as all that; but believe you me, it is bad enough!

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival a bus in cobwebs

Whilst we all know from experience that the wheels of bureaucracy tend to grind slowly no matter where we are, what kind of mentality is it that oils the cogs of rudeness?

It is sad to admit, but all the same a regrettable fact, that border security on both sides of the fence, be it the Russian or Polish side, can be, and mostly are ~ with one or two exceptions ~ how can I put it? ~ beyond officious. Let us just conclude that anyone working for border control is unlikely to be considered for a post in the diplomatic core and prudently leave it at that.

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

So, you have been stared at, stamped and waved on, survived death by terminal boredom and at last the wheels are turning. The bus that you are travelling in, which contains people a lot more stressed and impatient than the ones you started out with, trumps off up the road, gets stuck, for extra harassment measure, at two or more sets of traffic lights and then trundles forward a few more yards before grinding to a sickening halt on the Polish side of the border.

And it’s here we go again: the only noteable difference being the cut of the uniforms and insignia on them.

By the time we arrived at the airport we were veterans in the waiting game, but even our rigorous introduction was insufficient to prepare us for what was yet to come.

I will say that as far as design is concerned, I personally like Gdansk Airport ~ all those tubular steel struts, asymmetrical folds and sweeps and the way that the ceiling soars like giant birds in flight. Great visuals and expressive atmosphere; shame about the security staff. They are as rude as rude, but there is entertainment to be had in being to them what Manuel was to Basil in Fawlty Towers: “Qué?”

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival Waiting at Gdansk Aitport

Above: I can’t stand the waiting any longer; you’ll have to go by yourself!

On the day that we travelled through Gdansk Airport nothing short of utter confusion reigned. The flight was scheduled for 3.10pm and our bus driver, who would normally have deposited us at Gdansk bus station, realising that those of us who required the airport were in danger of missing our flights because of the long delay at the border, drove us on to the airport terminal. We sailed through Gdansk airport security system, bought a couple of bottles from the duty free and checked the electronic flight boards. Everything was fine; but then it wasn’t. The flight at 3.10 had become the delayed flight to the UK departing at 4.30! A Jack Daniels with ice helped.

We were sat close to gate 27, where we should have been, when, suddenly, it was ‘all aboard’ but at gate 28! The flight time has also changed to 4pm, but at 3.50pm they are opening the gates, and we are all on our feet and queuing. Our so-called priority passes, which do nothing more than allow you to queue lower down the stairwell than those who have been smart enough not to pay for the privilege, put us in this position, where we stood with mounting impatience for nigh on fifteen minutes, before it was announced that we had to return to the waiting area.

As we passed one of the company’s representatives, I asked why? What was happening? His reply: “We are waiting for a new captain!” Good heavens, I thought, I hope he qualifies before next spring. I did offer to fly the plane myself. Humouring me, the man asked if I had a licence. “Dog or TV?” I replied. Flying licence! “Well,” I said, “I’ve got a kite and an airman’s hat.”

Back in our seats, where we were fast becoming super-waiters, I hoped that the ‘new captain’ was not in fact the old captain, whose delay was due to one too many. I disclosed my fears to Olga, who thought she had caught a glimpse of someone wearing a battered captain’s hat and nothing else, being dunked in a bath of ice-cold water behind the airport’s dustbins, which is only a stones (or stoned) throw away from the airline’s Lame Excuse Department.

The electronic score board now informed us that the next flight from Gdansk to the UK was rescheduled for 5.30pm but, as before, it lied. Lucky for us we were far too tired to be somewhere else in the airport, for at 5pm we were off again, through the checkout and down the steps.

By now everyone without exception was suffering from chronic waiting disease. Many of our fellow passengers had found consolation in the bottle and as a result resembled zombies hired from Rent a Misfit.

At long last, it happened, but it didn’t: We, and the worse-for-wears were sitting on the plane but wait a moment … a moment … a moment … the pilot had not arrived. Was he waiting to be awarded his model aircraft flying diploma or had he got stuck in the bathtub?

At last it did happen! We had lift off! Shame that the same could not be said for the airline’s credit/debit card system. I presume it must have died from something like airport terminal waiting. And why was there no vodka on board? Hiccup! This is your captain slurring.

Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival

We landed at Luton Airport ~ now there’s a relief ~ where everything, I was pleased to find after almost three years’ absence remained delightfully British. Of course, there are obvious visual exceptions to the definition of what constitutes British, but the prevailing wind continues to blow in the direction of British standards. One contributory factor is that apart from the airport’s security guards, who are tooled up and reinforce-vested, London-Luton’s border control and its customs officers do not do military; smart and corporate is the name of the game and even the airport’s immigrant staff can scrub up satisfactorily when they put their mind to it. I’m not sure if the airport retains classic British salutations such as ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ and ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ or whether it has succumbed to pseudo-liberal pressure for gender-bending woke alternatives. But what I can say categorically is that as far as first impressions count, London Luton hits the spot.

The second thing you will notice at Luton Airport, indeed any airport in the UK, apart from the majority minorities, is that no sooner have you retrieved your cases than mugging your purse and wallet begins. UK airports are hideously expensive. London Luton’s Airport carpark must be run by the mob, as the cost of a two-minute stay in the so-called drop-off and pick-up zone is protection-racket extortionate. Yes, I think we can all agree that there’s nothing like England’s welcome mat, but once you have crossed the threshold you know that the meter is ticking.

Return journey

A piece of cake our trip to England certainly had not been, but the return journey took the biscuit. When we were outward bound, we had purposefully travelled light, but going back our extremely large cases were stuffed to the gills with items unobtainable in Kaliningrad, such as 40 jars of marmite, decorative retro metal wall signs, plus numerous gifts and souvenirs.

Having overdone it on shopping sprees, on visits to the pub, on workouts, on late nights and on generally trying to cram too much into too little time, our cases may have been full, but I was travelling on a half empty health tank ~ nothing like a good holiday to set you to rights, I say! And it was grim: the 4.30am start required to catch our flight from Luton was grim, but at least it was uneventful.

The real problems for us began when we arrived in Gdansk ~ and here is something you should bear in mind, especially if you are Russian.

Olga’s daughter had booked our return from Gdansk bus station using an online booking system. The bus was scheduled to depart at 6pm, but it was about 11am Polish time when we arrived at Gdansk airport. This disparity between the flight’s arrival and the bus’s departure had been purposefully contrived, as, although there was an earlier bus at one o’clock, the excessive delays on the outward journey had caused us to act with caution. Sod’s law had it, however, that the return flight was bang on schedule, and we were back in the business of waiting again.

Our immediate destination from the airport was the bus station. We would go there by taxi, stash our bags in the left luggage department, presuming that they had one, and then idle our time away.

Gdansk bus station is reminiscent of Corby dole office in the 1960s, even down to the stink of piss. It is a concrete catastrophe from that era, constructed on two levels, decorated with pigeon shite and a lift that does not work. The left luggage department is not a department as such, but a big tin thing on the station’s lower level split into different sized lockers with doors that need coins to operate them*. Consequently, we had a twofold problem: (1) Karting two incredibly heavy cases down umpteen flights of steps and (2) obtaining Polish coins in the correct denominations.

The extreme awfulness of Gdansk bus station and the thought of time to kill, encouraged Olga to investigate the possibility of exchanging the 6pm bus tickets for the 3pm service.

One thing that Gdansk bus station did have going for it was that it had a cafeteria*. I use the term cafeteria because it reminded me of somewhere I once had the misfortune to visit on a school trip. I think it was the canteen of an up-North pickle factory. Our school was short on education but inventive in saving funds. {Apologies to Headmaster Lowe. I am not referring to the Prince William School but Chalky White’s secondary modern!)

*Please note that when I was in Gdansk in September 2023, both the left-luggage canisters and the cafeteria had ceased to exist, thus making Gdansk bus station an even more horrible place than it was before. Thought I’d better warn you. They haven’t closed the toilets yet, but it costs 5 zlotys a pee!

Knock the school if you like, but let’s don’t knock the cafeteria. At least it was somewhere to sit, to have a hot drink and a snack. Cosy, it was not; friendly, it was not. There are still some things to be said for England! But first we needed zlotys (that’s Polish money, if you did not know it).

The extreme awfulness of Gdansk bus station and the thought of time to kill, encouraged Olga to investigate the possibility of exchanging the 6pm bus tickets for the 3pm service. We had no zlotys for tea, and we had no zlotys for the left-luggage lockers. Gdansk Bus Station Information office had no information. Exchanging tickets? An earlier bus? Don’t ask us, we’re only the information office.

We were both cold, tired, hungry and I was feeling ill.

I volunteered to go and seek out a ‘hole in the wall’, even though I instinctively knew, erroneously as it happened, that the location we were in was unlikely to be furnished with such a crucial convenience. Whilst I was gone, Olga said she would contact her daughter to see if it was possible for her to exchange the tickets online. It turned out that it wasn’t.

One 20-minute walk later, I espied the kind of hole I was looking for. It was not a hole in the wall exactly, but a hole protruding from a shop window. I did not like the look of this hole when I saw it from a distance and liked it even less at closer quarters. I certainly had no inclination to entrust my debit card to it in case the machine had been ‘got at’.

Flustered, and not relishing the thought of returning to Olga with mission unaccomplished, nevertheless this is what it amounted to. The real rub was that when I did return, Olga asked me why I had not used the cash dispenser at the front of the bus station? Doh! I had only walked straight past it! What a kick in the nuts! And the words of our old friend Barry, who had accompanied us on our trip to Kaliningrad way back in 2004, echoed across the decades, “You pair are a walking disaster!” ~ to be said in a northern accent.

Too tired to exonerate myself, I followed Olga’s directions but with the gravest misapprehension. The hole in the glass window which I had not used because it had looked dodgy was a paragon of virtue compared to the one at the bus station. The Perspex screen was scratched, it reflected dull orange in the LED light with which it was lit and the options that it displayed were almost indiscernible. It took four attempts to get it right, to extract money from that mean machine and throughout the entire dispensing experience I felt distinctly uncomfortable. It was a mean little machine in a mean hollowed-out husk of a building, and it also refused to provide a receipt.

Have zlotys will eat, we took refuge in the café. There we would buy tea from the miserable woman behind the counter, change some zloty notes into zloty coins to use in the left-luggage piggy bank, dispose of the bags, go for a walk.

It was a cold day but at the time of our walk it was blue skies and sunshine. We decided to return to Gdansk old town where we had not been since my first journey to Kaliningrad at the turn of the 21^st century (makes me feel like Dr Who ~ the man version, not the PC one! {There was only one Dr Who and that was William Hartnell!})

Gdansk ‘old town ‘is, in fact, a perfect facsimile of the old town, since the old town underwent extensive modification thanks to Adolf Hitler and his Luftwaffe architects. However, if you ever go to Gdansk, the new-old town is well worth visiting.

Mick Hart expatkaliningrad in Gdansk 2022

We took in the sights and found food and warmth in one of the many restaurants, but now the sun had gone, leaving in its wake a sharp and chilling cold. With one and a half hours to kill, we made our way back to the bus station. We had no idea from which bay the bus we needed departed, so Olga did the logical thing, she returned to the bus information office.

As before, the information office which had no information about exchanging tickets had no information about our bus: Which Bay does your bus depart from? Don’t ask us we’re just the bus information service. We eventually worked it out for ourselves; not which bay we needed but that from the official information office to the average man on the street, once they tumbled that Olga was Russian, your Polack turned deaf and dumb. I suppose like every EU member, Poland is waiting for Biden to tell them when they can be polite again.

The second information office, which lay inside a concreted labyrinth of subterranean walkways, went one better. Not only did they not know from which bay our bus departed, they denied its very existence and the existence of the bus itself, although we had tickets to travel! It was beginning to get amusing.

Dragging the heavy cases from the lockers up two flights of steps and then loitering in the bitter wind was not so funny. We asked a couple of Polacks on the street the bus question for which we could get no answer, and one of them was so appalled or frightened when he heard the Russian lingo that he practically dashed away.

We decided we must divide and conquer. I went to reconnoitre the bus park to see if I could spot the bus, whilst Olga, having clocked a small group of people huddled against the wind behind the back of the bus station, went to ask the dreaded question.

My mission was unsuccessful (isn’t it always!), but on my return I found that the group that Olga had approached were waiting (note that word ‘waiting’ again) for the same bus as us. Like us, they had little or no information to go on, but thought that the bus would depart close to where we were standing. The girl who Olga was talking with then added, in a low whisper, “It’s probably better if they (‘they’ meaning the Polacks) don’t hear you talking in Russian.” Well, now, this was what I call information! And it seemed to improve my Russian no end, because, having been warned to the contrary, Russian words and phrases were flying out of my mouth like economic migrants spilling from small crammed boats across the length and breadth of Dover’s shores.

Therefore, it was probably fortuitous that, struggling to contain my new-found language skills, my eye alighted on a bus hidden away at the side of the road. There was no bus bay and no other way of knowing whether this was our bus or not, but working on the hunch that it wasn’t speaking Russian, we decided to investigate. And hey presto, Fanny’s your aunt and Bob’s your unfriendly Polack, was I right or was I right!? (for once!).**

** In September 2023, I discovered a piece of paper taped to the wall on the inside of Gdansk dole office, sorry I mean bus station, stating the bay number from which the bus leaves for Kaliningrad. Then it was bay 11. Bay 11 is not really a bay as such but a number painted on a piece of tin stuck on the corner of the bus station. Although the destination from bay 11 is a place or a town in Poland, as stated on the piece of tin, and Kaliningrad is not mentioned, three people have since corroborated that this was the bay they used to travel by bus to Kaliningrad. The best way of locating this ‘bay’ is not to ask at Information, as they’ll either grunt or will not tell you. Exiting from the front of the station, with the railway lines in front of you, hang a hard left and then left again, and walla! ~ bay 11!

Relieved that we had discovered our transport out of Poland, I was less excited by the fact that our chariot of deliverance was a minibus, even less so when the answer to the question ‘Where do we stow our heavy bags?’ was in the Skibox clipped to the back of the bus. Though the driver made the mistake of lifting our heavy cases into the Skibox for us, he never made the same mistake twice, neither at the border crossing or later when he put us down in Kaliningrad. And who can really blame him?

The cases did have to come out again when we arrived at the Russian border, and, naturally, we had to go through the same rigmarole of standing in front of poker-faced officers sitting in little square cubicles, but that inquisition apart the process though tiring was fairly straightforward. Nevertheless, we would have to endure another hour of waiting when some woman was detained either because she had the wrong travel documents, the wrong items in her luggage or who can say what else was wrong with her? But something was not quite right.

Finally, back on home territory, all we had to do now was lug the cases into a waiting taxi and from the boot of the taxi into the house.

The return journey, which had begun at 4am British time, ended in Kaliningrad at 12 midnight. Ahh, back to a nice warm house, which no doubt it would have been if the fuse box had not tripped out owing to some electrical fault or other.

In conclusion, the Kaliningrad to UK or UK to Kaliningrad route via Gdansk Airport and by bus is not as direct as one would like. However, it gets you there in the end and on the way tests personal virtues, such as patience, diplomacy, tact, resourcefulness, stamina and so forth. Yet, those of a nervous disposition are advised to approach it with caution. Prepare yourself for the journey. Perhaps an hour of meditation and a course on anger management before you leave the house?