5) A tranquil night at club Frantic

 Part 5 of my diaries from my trip to Kraków. Read them in order!

 

After dinner at Avacado and amber ale at Szynk, I wasn’t quite ready for bed, so I decided to explore Kraków’s nightlife a bit further; it was a Friday night afterall. Back at the hostel I changed into a shirt before taking the very familiar route up Godzka to Rynek Głowny. From there I found the well known club Frantic with ease.

 

Frantic’s “sniffy door policy”, as described in one of my guide books, didn’t give me any problems, though once inside I noticed that it wasn’t that full for a Friday. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the guide book might have been a bit out of date. I was happy anyhow, as I was able to find a seat at the bar and the DJ obviously knew what he was doing; a refreshing change from the Colly and other establishments of a similar calibre to which one becomes accustomed when living in Coventry!

 

Going to a club on your own doesn’t always make for the most exciting night, but I wanted to see what the nightlife was like in Kraków and see how Poles my age enjoy themselves when they’re out. I hadn’t really expected to see anything I hadn’t seen in England and indeed after a couple of vodkas I was thinking that I could be in Coventry, OK not Coventry, but maybe Birmingham or Manchester, perhaps London. Then the thought occurred to me that regardless of my condition as an introvert, were I in a club in London I would probably find the lack of company just as objectionable as the most gregarious of club goers.

 

I was not in London though. I was Kraków. I was travelling, exploring, and having a little adventure. Normally, I would have had no difficulty simply sitting somewhere, soaking up the atmosphere, enjoying the music and watching the people around me have a good time, but as I’d begun to question what I was getting out of being at Frantic, I started to feel a bit awkward. It was just as I was about to draw breath, in order to ask myself aloud whether or not I was in fact mad, that I was saved by Maria.

 

I’d been vaguely aware of the beautiful blonde next to me at the bar for a while. Sitting quite still as she surveyed the dance floor, she smoked slowly; her composed appearance an island of serenity in the extravagance of Frantic’s bare brick basement interior lit with bright neon lights and flickering video projections.

 

Maria had been there since I’d arrived but until this point we hadn’t so much as exchanged glances. I forget exactly what I said to open the conversation, but it was something in Polish, probably bad Polish. It was difficult to speak over the sound of the DJ’s set, but rather than giving me the frosty reception I thought I might receive, Maria greeted my savage attempts to use her language genially.

 

After we’d introduced ourselves and established our nationalities, Maria complimented me on my accent, which triggered a big smile. I asked if she spoke any English but she confessed apologetically that she did not. I hadn’t considered that there might be another language in which we could communicate, until Maria revealed that she spoke some French. Wonderful! A whole new dimension of conversation was now possible!

 

I’d been wishing that I’d learnt more conversational Polish, rather than restricting my studies to the purely functional and very useful, but utterly boring phrases about making travel arrangements etc. No sooner had this subsided, than I found myself wishing that I’d paid more attention in French at school. Though my French is undoubtedly better than my Polish, I thought, Maria is unlikely to be interested in any of the absorbing topics from my GSCE syllabus still lingering in my mind, such as my favourite subjects and the name of my (imaginary) pet.

 

Maria seemed genuinely impressed by the bits of Polish I’d learnt and spent the whole chat smiling broadly and nodding enthusiastically each time she understood something that I’d said, somehow without loosing her air of cool. We both did our fair share of shrugging our shoulders and saying, “Przepraszam, nie rozumiem,” (Sorry, I don't understand) and a number of potential conversations never made it past the initial question/statement once it had proved unintelligible to the other party. We muddled on nonetheless and managed several more exchanges in bits of Polish and French before the truly pleasant but equally taxing banter came to a natural end. By natural end, I mean the way the progress of a car comes to a natural end when you drive it up a 20% gradient hill and it runs out of petrol.

 

A photographer from the website www.nightlife.pl came round and took a picture of us. Maria’s expression was a little dour on the first picture (see below), so the photographer took another. I thought I was beaming excessively the first time, so for the second shot I tried a less inane grin. The unfortunate effect was that I ended up looking positively po-faced, thus, in the end it was the first photo that was preserved for the website.

 

Maria said goodbye and drifted off with some friends after a while. I stayed a little longer to enjoy a couple more żołądkowa gorzka shots and bizarrely ended up chatting to a couple of Mancunians who were in Kraków for the weekend. Barry was perfectly friendly and chatted quite freely, making some amusing observations about the lunatic who had been dominating the dance floor for the last hour or two. We had little in common however, and it was getting rather late, so I left before long.

 

Getting to bed at about 6.30am I wondered what time I would get up. Thinking that I had probably squandered my time on an excessively long night out at the expense of the precious daytime hours of the day ahead, I hoped I wouldn’t feel that I’d wasted my Saturday for the sake of an experience, much of which I could have had in England.

More to follow...

Maria and me in Frantic.