Tourism in Poland

I'd say it was more about her personality, a sort of Basil Fawlty if you know that TV show. These were 30 and 40 something married women, and given that it was day time, I really doubt they'd be dressed in crop tops, mini skirts, high heels and burdelówki.


True.

I've stayed in maybe 4 or 5 hotels in your city. No bad or really strange experiences however once when I stayed there (I think it was the chain hotel near the old synagogue - is it the Novotel?) something puzzled me. I was there with a woman friend for a meeting to do with a voluntary activity we do and she explained what it was about. It was pretty unusual.

Em before arriving at the hotel, I'd noticed something odd. There were groups of women, mostly middle aged in twos, threes or fours walking around town. They were all reseeds identically in big coats and red hats. In the hotel lobby there were even more women in small groups also dressed the same, with the red hats. When we were going to our rooms, there was a room open on the corridor with women in and they tried to hand my friend a red hat from the box.

It was to do with that TV journalist (I forget her name) who died of cancer and whose husband became (I think) the minister of health. Apparently, once a year they visit a different city in Poland and all dress the way she used to on TV. It was surreal to say the least to see a couple of hundred women all dressed identically walking around the town, most of them staying in our hotel.

Perhaps the most unusual hotel I've stayed at in PL was actually in a medieval castle. I forget which one, only that it was in the north east, not quite in Mazury and the next day we visited Święta Lipka. Lovely rooms and a real castle though as I remember it was fairly cold due to the thick stone walls. It had a small but nice restaurant/bar, and upstairs in the hotel there were lots of antiques and big heavy furniture.

I stayed in one in Kielce once that was Chinese themed. Quite a nice hotel, old fashioned but with character.

Scuse the typos in the last post; I'm on a crazy slow connection and it went a bit strange when I tried to edit.

Could be, but considering the circumstances I'm not surprised in the least by what she assumed...

There are "high-end" prostitutes who don't dress like streetwalkers and there are rich businessmen who take their "sugar babies" to business trips and bring them to business dinners while the oblivious wives stay at home... Those "sugar babies" are usually much younger, but "ordinary" prostitutes come in all ages, so I guess you never know... But, yeah, as I wrote, the hotel owner should at least do some research first lol

I think you mean the former Ibis hotel (now it belongs to B&B Hotels).

No idea, to be honest...


I've never heard of such an event, but I imagine how surreal it must've been to witness it :)))


This sounds wonderful and those thick stone walls must be great during summer :))

These were definitely more likely to look like slightly dowdy housewives and bespectacled schoolteachers.

I used to teach intensive courses in a hotel near Łódź (I'll not name the location or hotel but it's a good one) and the guys I taught always used to order prostitutes by asking the receptionists who apparently get a kickback for it.


That's it, Ibis are part of the Accor chain like Mercure and Nivotel. You can sometimes get bargains if you have a loyalty card with them.

There's another story actually about that chain. It was the Novotel Gdańsk Marina. Actually a good hotel however my parents stayed there and there were two things. One is that it's badly misnamed, being quite a long way from the city (it's past the famous Falowiec building) and there were a couple of large family groups (both from Scotland) there for the weekend who obviously hadn't checked the location on a map before booking and were sad in the lobby constantly moaning about how far they were from town. The other thing is that my folks found a used tampon under the bed. The hotel did give them another room though.

Now you are assuming things :))) I'm sure those women dressed nicely, etc. for such a lunch. Also, apparently minis were not uncommon in the 90s in Poland, so who knows what they were wearing and how conservative that hotel owner was ;) I don't know this lady and I don't know what those wives were dressed like, but I know life and what is going on in hotels and at those conferences and delegations, etc., so... All I'm saying is that I'm not terribly surprised by her assumptions.


Yup, so you know what I'm talking about...


Eww... Fortunately, I haven't had such problems in the hotels I've stayed so far (I mean them being dirty or sth).

Sometimes, we used to do the training in an even nicer hotel by the Czech border. They always used to go across because apparently there was a very cheap brothel just over on the Czech side They were always trying to get me to go with them though obviously I never did. Once (when I'd been invited but had declined) they said afterwards that there was only one good one there at the time so they all piled on the same one at the same time. They were all mid/late twenties guys (some of them very tasty indeed) and I rather regretted not going with them on that occasion.

Another (sort of) hotel story. I used to go away for weekends around Poland with a friend. I was a lot poorer then than now and my friend was always on a very tight budget (plus he's as mean as mustard and hates spending money). He'd booked the hotel and said it was called the 'Pensionat PCK'. I thought that sounded familiar however they couldn't possibly be a hotel named after the Red Cross and didn't think much about it.

It turned out not to be a hotel but a kind of przytulak with homeless families in. Clean, comfortable and cheap though.

A couple of times with the same guy, I stayed in Katowice. He also found a cheap place which was extremely unusual but cheap and I'd go again (except it's demolished now with expensive flats on the site). It was a 'sports hotel' connected to a tennis club, basically rooms above the changing room and bar. Being a tennis club, pretty well everyone in the bar and in the hotel were butch lesbians.

A convenient and cheap place to stay though; it's a shame it's gone.

Do you mean the sports hotel in the Bażantowo estate in Katowice?

Uphill from the station, quite a walk away, at the very top of (or just past) that district with the nice 1920s and 1930s buildings. It's been gone for a few years now since I fancied staying there again and looked.

Okay, it's not the same hotel.

That was my answer to jon357's question whether the chain hotel near the former synagogue in Kielce is a Novotel hotel (Admin cut out the quote in my post).