Went to Poland for a week with some fuzzies. Would you like a report? Well, they would, so tough. The entourage for the trip consisted of me (Equiczyk), Shaun (Szawnov), Yoshi (Yoszczyk), Timber (Tymbyźyka), Flux (Fłuczsz), Mousie (Mauszovski), Temperance (Tęmparańszczykovskawicz) and our Polish host Benny (Byńowałov).

First of all - Poland. Lovely country, very cheap but too many voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilants for my liking. In short: the language is impossible to wrap your brain around. We arrived at Wroclaw airport and crammed into this absolute dziwoląg of a van, which we tasked with taking us to Kowary, a glorious rural town on the south border of Poland. This clapped-out bangermobile barely made it up the hills, didn't want to reverse, didn't generally enjoy moving and the GPS kept getting lost. We sztopped at a Tesco (Teszko?) on the way, and stocked up on dirt cheap vodka. The cheapest bottles were £2! TWO POUNDSZ for a bottle of vodka! The really expensive stuff was pushing a tenner. You know when you buy something and it gets to the till and it's a lot less than the sticker price and you hope that nobody notices? That's how EVERY item felt. Everything was freakishly czeap but I still managed to spend almost £100 in there - mostly on czocolate, alcohol and general food for the week.

We stopped in a country house with a gloriousz landscape. Rolling hills, mountains, greenery, it was lovely. In attendance were the two huskies of Benny's, Smirnoff and Imma, who had this hilarious act of pretending to be hungry and whining at us when we didn't feed them. Neverthelesz, the main objective of going away for the week was to play board games, which we did, before things got weird (more on that later). Robo Rally involved drawing a path for your robots to follow, trying to avoid being knocked off course by other players (the closest I'll get to Robot Wars, yay, youth TV), Cosmic Encounter involved card battles between entire solar systems belonging to aliens with special powersz, Red November involved saving ourselves from a submarine that was on fire and flooded and being attacked by Cthulu (normal submarine ride) and the glorious dice game Yahtzee, which was the loudest game of the lot, apart from the arguments about who would be Sheriff in Werewolves of Millers Hollow. There was also a pool table, and I was szit.

In the middle of it all we szczheduled a trip up the local mountain (for they have one), catchily called Sněžka, on the Polish-Czech border. For a brief moment, I was actually in the Czech Republic and danced between the two countries like an obviousz tourist. At the top there was a wonderful restaurant but the walk up nearly did kill us. At 1,602m high, it is higher than any point or peak in the UK (or the Czech Republic, for that matter), and 1,200m higher than the house we were staying in.

Then things got weird, as we played real life Haunted House by sending Flux (our loveable pet gecko) around the house with a torch, at night, and it was our job to scare him. In the basement there is źero light, but he failed to walk in to the bakery room, where I could be found holding a pizza spatula like an axe awaiting the pounce. We also tried Capture The Flag In The Dark but we all just stood around waiting for the other team to make their move on the solo flight of sztairs we had. It failed.

I don't remember a lot else as we spent most of the nights drinking. I think the holiday was summed up by the image of Shaun awaking from bed at 11am and coming downsztairs to enjoy a breakfast of a bag of crisps and a beer before standing on the trampoline, gently vacillating.

We arrived back in Blighty worn out, exhausted, gamed out and still a bit drunk. But everyone had terrific fun and we definitely need to do it again. Big thanks to Benny for hosting, thanks to everyone for being such good sportsz and everybody is friends forever. Except I've not heard from any of them since.

Oh.

Viva Polska,
Equium