A good part of my first hole day in Lodz was taken by moving from hostel to hostel. The Flamingo, where I stayed the first night, could have me only for one night. But I didn't like it there for several reasons anyway. So I searched for other hostels, with google maps and OSMAND, the open street map application on my phone. The attractive hostels where booked out, then I tried a couple of others, from the Virtual-Lodz website and also from the OSM application. One from the cities website appeared to have closed, and anotherone from OSM too. So I ended up at a place that was indicated to me on the day of my arrival, but at this time did not seem attractive enough. Well, in the meantime the preference changed and the place turned out to be quite ok. It was an old hostel, worn down a bit, but it had everything I needed, friendly personel and a pink staircase!
Here I met Rico, a guy that is currently studying in Dresden and who spent the lass three weeks driving through Poland with his old Mazda. He is about the sixth guy from that region I met during my stay in Poland. We spent the eavening haning out, drinking beer from the "skleb" smoking and discussing. The next day, before he went further to Krakow, we found a nice bar, that also for him was a discovery, after having walked through most of the center of the city in the past three days. It was a really cool place with comic art on the walls. When we left the place we ran into the owner of the bar who was showing the new paining on the wall on the outside of her bar. Apparently it was finished just the day before. And so, after some really good time, we went both our ways again.
There is one thing though Rico mentioned to me about an incident that happend during his stay in Warszawa. Apparently there was a guy who tried to burn himself in front of the parlament. Apparently it was often discussed by his friends and the information seemed a bit confusing. So I tried to look it up myself and first found something in "Der Standard", an austrian magazin. Pretty much the same is written here.
The rest of the day I was wandering through the city, looking out for a bike shop to trade some spare parts that turned out to be useless to me for some others.
The thrid day was dedicated to sightseeing. But here pretty much the same thing happend as in Gdansk. The weather was too nice to spend time indoors, so I lingured another day, eating a bite here, having a coffee there. Also I've gotten a bit restless and now I'm looking forward to hit the road.
Lodz appeared to be quite different from Szczecin or Gdnask. The people look different and the ambiance is a different one, maybe less relaxed than Gdansk. Although it is not allowed to drink in public in Poland, here some people don't seem to care about it. One thing that was much appreaciated by myself, was that there was no dog poo on the streets, that it a lot less than for instance in... hmmm ... Dresden-Neustad.
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