bean bag chairs, a tram with a side of lard

So I go back to my new hotel and lay down and blog for a while.  The walls are so thin that when the guy next door sneezes, I actually think he is in the room for a minute. Then I notice some noise in the hall and I am thinking - great!  I go into the hall and realise that they have put me on the same floor as a soccer team who are running up and down the hall before heading to the bar.

It is pouring down rain now and so I venture out to find the place for dinner.  I stop in a place I think it is, and then I realise it isn't - after I purchased a glass of wine.  So I go back into the rain and eventually find the place; it's Italian.  The dinner was a bit odd as things are when you all don't know one another and the people that set the whole thing up haven't showed due to travel issues.  Four hours later, we had all eaten - nothing spectacular, I was just glad I hadn't ordered the steak because it was grey.

Back at the hotel, I fall asleep with the fear that I might not get to eat in Polish food while I am in Poland.  The meeting the next day was good and challenging.  The office is impossibly cool in a mall with a center atrium filled with plants and multicoloured bean bag chairs.  

They feed us Pizza Hut pizza and Kentucky Fried Chicken French fries for lunch.  I almost cried, but I was hungry.  After an all hands meting with the office - where the average age is 24 - we are given 10 minutes to go back to the hotel and change.

The evening started by asking the tram to make a loop around the city because 10 minutes wasn't enough for us.  Then we got on this very cool, very old tram and we trundled around the city, drinking beer, laughing and listening to the wonderful lady tell us all about Krakow.

One of our team had missed the tram, so we stopped and waited for him at two stops while the incredible lady in rapid fire Polish tried to tell the taxi driver how to meet up with us.  Each time we had to move because it's like a one way system, and we were in the way.  At the end of the ride, we had a contest on Krakow history and everyone in my booth won, while the other booths were shouting stop giving them the answers.

After the tram ride, we went to dinner at place in the old ghetto - where the Jews were kept; the place was called Fire and Sword - in Polish.  This place was cool and old worldy.  We didn't have to order and instead we just sat at long wooden benches and watched what happened next.  The first thing to happen was a platter of bread.  The bread was a traditional Polish starter slathered with lard and bits.  I managed to eat the one with the flabby fatty bacon, but I couldn't do the one that looked like it had gummy bears on it. It tasted good but the texture made me want to hurl.

Shots came and went.  I tasted them and then poured them into someone else's glass while they were looking the other way and then waited for the rest of the table to start harassing him about not drinking his drink.  This is one of my favourite work night games.

Then came the meat.  There were ribs and a giant clod of crispy skin coated fat; I liked this very much.  There was also some meat that was called duck, but the fat was in the wrong place to be duck.  There were periogies - meat and cheese.  I ate like 8 of these, maybe more than 8.

There were giant baked potatoes and other meat things that I thought were the same of what I had already eaten, but then turned out to be something else all together.  I ate all of this until I was feeling very greasy, but happy greasy.

Desserts was 'apple pie' that didn't look like apple pie. When it showed up with chocolate all over it I asked if I could have one without chocolate and I was told...No.  We walked back to the hotel along the river, while a smaller group headed off to the square to get in trouble.

The next day we finished up our meeting and assigned actions.  I 'left' at 1330 and headed over to a cool hotel/spa and had a great facial and some fresh squeezed juice.  My driver then took me to the airport where I have sailed through the process and spent my last 10 zloty on tyskie, so I could finish my last Polish blog.