The Homecoming - Day 0

Last day in Poland... For a while at least..

A pretty normal day at work. The usual combination of implementing feature requests and bug-fixing. I didn’t quite get everything done that I wanted to, so that meant I would have to do some work in the evening. Something I hadn’t done for quite a while. Apart from lesson the evenings are reserved for rest and relaxation, or very occasionally some out of hours publishing or server fixes.

4pm work officially stopped. People to see, places to go. But this time specific people and specific places. The place to go was in fact Plac Artystow. For the Santa Flash Mob. In excess of 300 people, arranged in a line along Sienkiewicz Street, all wearing santa hats and waving sparklers. I didn’t even bring a sparkler and I certainly didn’t wear a Santa hat, but I thought might be interesting. Anyway, there would be the usual afterparty.

Out of the 300-odd people who had made a Facebook pledge to participate in the flash mob only a hundred of so made an appearance. After waiting around for a quarter of an hour or so for more people to arrive the line was formed. We didn’t quite extend the length of Sienkiwicza Street. I reckon another 2,000 people would be needed to accomplish that. The plan was to start a human chain of fire, lighting the sparklers at both ends of the chain and then lighting the sparkler of the person next to you. It didn’t quite work out that way. Many of the sparklers had fizzled out by the time the sparklers in the middle had been lit.

Still, however you look at it, the event was a success and we went off to the pub to celebrate and for me to say goodbye to people who I would see for a while. They were heading for far-flung exotic places such as India and Krakow. I opted to drink a cappuccino. People were amazed. I was amazed. After drinking the cappuccino I bought myself a proper drink. After a detour to the station to say farewell to a friend and buy a ticket for the next morning’s train ride I stopped off at Galeria Korona to buy a few gifts. Then I headed home, full of good cheer and slightly tipsy, to finish my work. Then I had to copy all the latest files to my laptop. My laptop, apart from making a sound like a dying giraffe, decided that its trackpad would fail and cause a semi-permanent right-clicking action.

After work there was some packing to do. It didn’t take long.

Vodka
Chocolates
Breakfast cereals from my beloved Biedronka
Enough clothes to last me for five days
A couple of man-bags (in one of them an umbrella as the UK weather forecast didn’t bode well; rain, rain and more rain was predicted for the next 10 days or so)

12 kilograms or so I estimated. Then there was the backpack. Most important thing (apart from my passport and boarding cards) to go in there was my laptop, but packing that could wait until the morning.

I set three different alarm on two different devices so that I would get up in the morning. 6:30am. By the time I got to bed it was well after midnight and my mind was still racing. Time to watch a couple of episodes of Game of Thrones and give my brain a rest.


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