Mazury, Days 1 and 2

Well, it was a long week, or long weekend, as everyone called it here. May 1st is the Polish Labor Day, and the 3rd is Constitution Day, which means that most people also get the 2nd off as well. Given that this year the holidays fell on a Tuesday and Thursday, many schools and businesses also closed on Monday and Friday (which is Steelworkers' Day), so I followed suit, canceled my Monday classes, and went to Mazury with Patrick.
Mazury is in the north of Poland, and justly called Land of a Thousand Lakes. Popular for sailing, kayaking, water-skiing, and associated water activities. And beautiful. Rolling hills, shady forests, quaint villages, pleasant resort towns, the whole bit. We had a good time, albeit a little cold.
We left Sosnowiec early Sunday morning, as it's a 9 hour train ride to Olsztyn, which is technically in Warmia, not Mazury, but on a good-sized lake anyway. At the station, Patrick, who's going back to the States after 5 years here, got an attack of the "Last Times." You know, when you leave a place you've lived in for awhile, you keep looking at things and thinking: It's the last time I'll see this/eat here/walk down this street/talk to this person. This trip was in a way his farewell tour, as we have no other holidays before the end of the semester, and he's leaving shortly after that. I mention it because this fact colored the week; you could almost sense memories being deliberately stored and tucked away against a future time.
Anyway, 9 hours, a few sandwiches, 6 drunk soldiers, several games of cribbage, a thermos of coffee, and 1.5 liter bottle of water later, we arrived in Olsztyn. I'd found an online deal for a 3-star hotel that was really cheap for the first night, and which claimed to be "near" the station. However, since I was unable to locate a map that showed the station, I was sceptical. Descriptions like that are notoriously unreliable, but I figured it couldn't be more than a ten or fifteen minute walk. But for once, reality was even better than advertised: Hotel Gromada was across the street from the station, something that I would've emphasized had I written the web page copy. It proved to be bland but clean, as expected; we dumped our stuff and headed out in the last of sunlight.
We'd both been told by both guidebooks and people that Olsztyn wasn't much, and we both took exception to this. It was a lovely rynek (market square) centered around what used to be the Town Hall, and is now the main library, complete with coffee cart in the lobby. Nice pubs and restaurants around the edges, with flower sellers and cotton candy vendors in front. By the winding river, which is nicely lined with trees and a grassy path, is a castle where Copernicus lived for a few years, though it was closed on Monday. Many buildings have interesting mosaics on their facades, or relief carvings, blocky and strong, either well-preserved medieval art or intended to evoke such, depicting the essentials of life, fish and animals, fruit and farming. The second night we stayed in the Hotel Wysoka Brama, which is in the old town gate: hostel rooms in the three story-gate itself, additional rooms in a more modern building attached to one side. At the lakefront, we drank beer on the deck of a nice and mostly empty restaurant, watching some kids weave around the docks in little 6-foot sailboats, and criticized the rowing efforts of what looked to be a Viking longboat of very poor sailors. There's a good Irish pub a block from the rynek and just an enormously friendly and helpful tourist office. I like Olsztyn, even if it did snow on us as we left for Mikolajki on Tuesday morning.