Hello! As part 2 of our trip to Tricity, I will post about the small village in which we spent just a few hours. I could not help myself and started out with a cheesy pun in the title, as the village in question is called Hel. Hel is nearly exclusively a summer holiday destination, as it is not otherwise the most exciting place - it has access to a port, it has a pretty cool beach and tons of establishments in which you can eat street food or sit down for a more proper meal - mostly fish.

What is the most interesting about the city is likely its geographical position. If you look at the map of Poland, it is this weirdly located peninsula in the North that you can see on the map under this paragraph. On top of that, it is also considered the "beginning of Poland", but I'll talk about it a little later. It is accessible by most forms of transport - you can cut distance by taking a boat, but actually taking the train or the road and going around the water takes just about the same amount of time. In fact, we took the boat to there and then train on the way back. This was actually an interesting story, as there was not a single way to purchase tickets at the station in Hel - we had to find a way to do so online, so thank goodness I speak Polish and was able to figure out how to do that.

The redpin is Hel. Image is a screenshot from Google Maps.

Road to Hel (hehe.)

One of the best parts of the whole trip was how we got there - we went by boat. It was called a catamaran, but I really don't think it was one. That doesn't exactly matter though, the point is: I love being on boats, ships, yachts and whatever else you may think of that sails, so I had tons of fun. Of course, doing so when it's like 11 degrees Celsius and being separated from the open sea only by this tiny peninsula meant that we expected to freeze.. But somehow it wasn't so cold, as the sun made sure we get to enjoy the journey.

There is something so astounding about staring at the horizon, seeing the sun brighten the waters.

We got lucky, as the season for sailing to Hel only began the day before we came to Tricity - so if we chose the weekend before, there would be no boats to take us there! The trip itself took just over one hour and it was really easy to see that we were there out of season: the "catamaran" was nearly empty (although we did get to take photos for an extremely cute elderly couple) and aside from a few people on the top deck, there was no one. On top of that, the usual establishments on the lower decks (the roofed ones) were closed, so there was no way to get ourselves coffee or a small snack which we hoped to call breakfast.

As it was a fairly long sail, we managed to even make time for a quick photoshoot or two!

I am good at many things - posing isn't necessarily one of them.

I do have a decent teacher though!

We're really trying to get more exciting with how we pose together.

Afternoon in Hel (okay, I should stop.)

We had a fairly short time in Hel afterwards (only spent around 4 hours!), but to be honest, I don't think we really needed more than that. It was clearly out of season and Hel is not exactly made to be visited off-season, with its main attractions being the sun, good weather and the outdoors.

We started our day with a dinner for breakfast (in Poland, dinner is eaten quite early in general, but we still outdid ourselves to do so at 11:30am), but it definitely was delicious - gotta love eating fish at seaside locations like this. On top of that, we got some nice pierogi to share - as my non-Polish friends never tried them before!

Makes me hungry just looking at it.

Hel just has many cute little things going for it, but none of them stands out especially. As we walked across the main street where all the stalls normally are, we encountered one of them - little boat-shaped benches, which are made in honour of "friends of Hel", which I assume are either entrepreneurs who invested there or celebrities who spoke well of the little town/village.

As i said, cute. Nothing awesomely special, but cute!

As in every seaside village or town, there is also a Neptune fountain. I don't really know the story behind it, but it is there, so here's a picture of it!

Finally, the story of Hel becoming the beginning of Poland that I mentioned at the very start of this post - what makes it so, except for its geographical location? Well, the truth is - the fact that people decided it should be marketed/considered as such. In 2007 or so, someone smart figured out that Hel does seem like it could be the beginning of Poland - especially that there are some legends about it being extremely old + some fairy tale stuff. Shortly after, a small "monument" was erected to make sure there's a landmark behind the story.

Now, the legend says that once there is complete peace in the world, some sort of stone golems will come out and live happily ever after - I assume out of Hel. I really wish I could tell you more, but all I learnt about it was what was written on a plaque next to the monument. Here's a photo of my girlfriend in front of the stones commemorating Hel being the beginning of Poland.

Yes, that's it!

Towards the end of our walk, we got to a beach, which wasn't too exciting at this time of the year at the Baltic Sea.. But well, it did provide me with a thumbnail picture for this post!

Oh, and I forgot to mention, there's a surprising amount of graffiti!

Closing Words

Hel was a great quick stop in our journey - we had an awesome boat ride, a good walk and found quite some cute stuff. Overall, I'm glad we went, but it was not the highlight of the trip - I'll write about those in upcoming posts!