Mon
03-Jan-2005

your disco needs you!

On Tuesday 28 December, Matt drove us back to London, where we deposited Francis so he could take the train up to Scotland to visit Steve’s parents and spend New Year with Steve and Kate. Meanwhile, Matt, Al and I headed to Luton to catch the plane to Katowice, Poland. Michal and Agata were joining us there for an epic Polish New Year Extravaganza. Michal’s friend Mirek had organised the whole thing – we were heading to the small town of Ustron down by the Czech border in the southwest corner of Poland, for five nights in the Hotel Tulipan.

We had a varied cast of characters: me, Matt, Alex, Michal, Agata, Michal’s brother Andre and his wife Justina. Then there was Mirek and his boyfriend Przemek, and their entourage of gay ruffians: Jack, a customs officer who was rather like a Polish version of Graham Norton and who was known as Jackonda (Jack + anaconda) because of his inimitable snake-like dancing style; Kostas, a Ukrainean turned Pole who was there with his Spanish boyfriend Kike; Crrris, like Ken from Barbie and Ken, a veteran of many gyms who insists on spelling his name with 3 Rs; Vitek, a Ukrainean with intense eyes, and his mute (well, very quiet) boyfriend Krysiek; and Darek. There was also a German guy and his Polish boyfriend, who vaguely knew Mirek, but they were only with us infrequently. The German guy was middle aged and very pervy – he spent the first night yabbering on about his grandfather in the First World War while attempting to remove Alex’s t-shirt.

We arrived at Katowice, and Przemek and Michal picked us up from the airport and took us to the local gay bar, Luna, where everyone was gathered. Luna was fun – very primitive by London standards with the walls decked with posters of early nineties computer art and cityscapes such as the twin towers of New York, and a triangular mural made out of CDs arrayed shiny side up. It was very relaxed, with big wooden tables and chairs, and you could buy whole bottles of booze and take them back to the table to share out. I rather like this laid back way of running an establishment.

We headed back around 3am to Mirek’s house – since Mirek had to go in for an hour or two of work that morning – and passed out all around his rather sizeable house. Next day, a minibus arrived to take our slightly hungover group to … the Hotel Tulipan.

The hotel was quite an amusing surprise when we arrived. It was built in the 1960s, as a great big concrete triangle, and looks remarkably dated now, like a great tired, Communist tower block. Elements of it reminded me of the South Bank in London – big expanses of concrete and unhelpful triangular angles everywhere. Inside there was lots of orange, brown and yellow, triangular mirrors and formica tables. It was definitely another world. We all traipsed around the hotel marvelling at the unique look, exclaiming at some detail of furnishing or other, and then unpacked in our rooms.

The only option at this point was the bar. This was in the basement, so we all went there and had a few drinks. It was a few hours till dinner, so people ordered these terrible spongy baguettes with cheese and mushroom from behind the bar, and ate those. Przemek actually ordered about a dozen of them, before realising they tasted like poo. Our holiday deal was that we got breakfast, lunch and dinner all provided, which meant that for the whole stay we didn’t really have to do anything except sit around drinking, chatting and waiting for the next meal to come along.

Dinner was outside that first evening – everyone got to roast sausages on skewers on an open fire while a bunch of people bizarrely dressed as red devils capered about to entertain us, with tribal drumming and setting off fireworks and breathing fire. They also served mulled beer, which was basically hot lager with honey – surprisingly nice. It became quite cold outside and gradually we all drifted back to the bar where, after a few hours, Kostas and Kike decided to plug the CD player they had brought along with them into the amp and speakers in a room adjoining the bar. Loud gay house music ensued, and there was general merriment. Mirek passed around pills, which were duly consumed, and members of our party started taking off their tops and gyrating with each other. The room with the speakers was reasonably concealed from the bar, but it was still fairly evident to other hotel guests that we were not an average bunch of young male travellers. At around 2am, we headed up to someone’s room and carried on making so much noise that by 4am, the hotel actually cut the power to our room.

Next morning, a member of staff from the hotel came to see us over breakfast and explained how they wanted to give us a separate room for New Year’s Eve. Even though it wasn’t yet two nights away, they were already preparing in the light of the noise of the night before. They were very nice to us about it though, they just wanted us to restrict our parties to the room by the bar down in the basement, to avoid keeping the other guests up all night. They continued to be very polite to us, even in our most unreasonable moments. Perhaps this was because we were spending huge amounts of money at the bar, which was where we spent pretty much all of the holiday, or perhaps, as Michal speculated at one point, it was because they thought we were mafia types. At any rate, our arrival at Hotel Tulipan was a mixed blessing for them. We brought a great deal of liveliness and fun to the hotel, but on the other hand we were up till the early hours playing pumping music every single night and we challenged their small town with constant, blatant displays of homosexuality.

The second day saw half of us venture out into Ustron itself, where we wandered around for a while before settling into a bar around a little round table and drinking for a few hours. Being huddled closely around the table made us all talk more freely, and we spent ages telling dirty sexual anecdotes and Matt kept learning rude phrases in Polish to scare the waitress with. We tried out tongue twisters in English, Polish, Ukrainian and Spanish, recited the Lord’s Prayer in all these languages and finally looked in wonder as an utterly drunk old man at a nearby table suddenly stood up, staggered towards us, asked us where we were going, and then apparently pissed his trousers before wandering out of the bar.

On the way back to the hotel, we picked up some Russian champagne (or ‘Shampan’) from the shop, which was rather disgusting, but only 3.99 zloty (70p) a bottle. We had a bottle with dinner.

After dinner, we all carried on drinking at the bar and once again Kostas and Kike plugged in the CD player and the house music came pumping forth. This time, there was a challenge to our supremacy of the small room. A German family came in along with one of the hotel receptionists, demanding that their music get an airing as well as ours. A massive argument ensued between the German mother and our party, with the receptionist bringing up the topic of our group’s homosexuality. She argued that we were being too difficult, that none of them had ever met “gay people” before; at one point she asked Michal how he had got so many gay men together – “did you find each other on the internet?!”

There was a compromise, and the CD player was given over to Germanic 1980s pop for an hour or so. We actually got on quite well with the German woman’s two daughters, who were embarrassed by their mother’s behaviour. One of them was a rather pretty dark haired girl, her older sister was somewhat odder. She was blonde and was wearing so much foundation that her whole face glowed an eerie pink in the UV light of our side room. Vitek commented: “She look like piece of shit. Really. She look like Marilyn Monroe, dug from grave!”

A bit harsh, maybe, but there was a misogynistic side to many of our gay Polish friends, which me and Michal worked hard to counteract. We actually met the blonde girl the next morning in town, and her face looked even more terrifying by day. So much makeup that I actually wondered if she’d suffered from some sort of scarring and was covering it up.

Matt was chatting to another German, Patrick, who’d come across from a neighbouring hotel – Hotel Magnolia – with his friends. Apparently, word had got around about the group of party people in Hotel Tulipan and they’d come over to check it out. They came back on subsequent nights, along with others.

It was a heavy night. Matt and I went back to our room and made a lot of mess, and then I got up around five in the morning and spent several hours with Przemek and Mirek drinking vodka spiced with speed and chatting about this and that. Mirek and I then went down to breakfast with Agata, and then Agata and I woke up Michal with a spliff. We all sat out in the hall outside our rooms, drinking, and Michal and I went to annoy Alex. He was lying in bed, looking rough. Most impressively, he had lost his memory, there were a few scrapings of shit on his bedsheets, and his trousers were soaking wet with piss. Only the Gods of Silesia shall ever know what happened to him that night.

Michal, Agata and I then wandered into Ustron for a pleasant bit of walking and shopping. We visited a little bakery and had tea and ponczek – Polish doughnut – and a strange cream tube thing which I can’t remember the name of. It was really nice, and reminded me of time we spent together back when I used to visit Michal and Agata in Lodz four or five years ago.

I finally got to sleep that afternoon, and then we got up and dressed for dinner. This was New Year’s Eve night, and everyone was specially dressed up. Down in the bar, we all applauded as each of us entered the room with a new outfit. Agata was particularly stunning and everyone insisted on having their pictures taken with her. A band had been hired to accompany dinner – a rather glamorous local outfit with keyboards, brass instruments and a sexy female vocalist. They opened the night with an instrumental version of My Way, and then played on and off all through the night, as dinner was served and new courses brought out on every hour from 8pm till 5am in classic Polish style.

The band and the evening’s entertainment was compered by a man from the hotel dressed as a devil, for some reason, and there were traditional Polish songs involving all the guests doing the conga, a young couple who performed showy and somewhat pretentious ball room dancing (the boy was about 14 and wearing too much makeup) and lots of crazy dancing from our party. I found myself spinning lots of enthusiastic middle aged Polish women around the dance floor while their dour husbands sat at the table knocking back vodka. People were up and dancing until the early hours – the Polish technique of serving huge amounts of food throughout the night makes this quite plausible. The crowning dish was an entire joint of pork for each guest, which unfortunately most of our group was too pilled up to be able to eat!

As the main New Year’s party drew to a close and the last hotel guests drifted upstairs to bed, we returned to our underground room by the bar and carried on dancing like the chemical party robots we were. Michal and I left Crrris, Kostas and Kike down there around 7am and left to have a spliff and walk round town. We walked up the road towards the mountains, chatting mainly about Polish Catholic priests and the joys of atheism. When we got back around 9am, the three party robots were still pumping out music downstairs, even as hotel guests were getting up for breakfast. We were forced to cut their music off and have a mild argument about reasonable behaviour in the circumstances. Michal’s brother and his wife were up eating breakfast at this point, and seemed amused by the state we were all in.

New Year’s Day was a sleeping in day. That evening our side room was taken over for an official disco – the DJs were a pair of green cheque suited, moustachioed, sweaty Polish guys who played enjoyable and slightly outdated pop and dance. We were all dancing enthusiastically as usual, and some of the party were gyrating rather suggestively at various points. This prompted one of the DJs to comment – in Polish, and quite reasonably I thought – “now for our next song these two gentlemen are going to remove their trousers”. Jackonda was outraged by this slur and stormed up to them, shouting at them to apologise. They were quite rude back, so he marched, or minced, upstairs to reception and made a formal written complaint, getting a manager out of bed (it was 3am) to come and apologise over the microphone that “they did not wish to discriminate against gay people and were sorry for what they said”. I was in hysterics – I think it was one of the funniest exchanges I have ever witnessed in a clubbing situation - and I wasn't on drugs that night so was able to keep track of things. The manager was actually quite good tempered about it all, as she’d been enjoying our stay in the hotel, and was all up for progressive, cosmopolitan influences.

Most of us stayed up that night, dancing till 7am or thereabouts, before a hideous breakfast and 10am bus ride away from Hotel Tulipan and back to Mirek’s house near Katowice. We coped with our tiredness and hangovers by lounging round his house drinking, playing with an enormous rubber dildo (waving it in people’s faces, mainly) and singing along to Chicago and Moulin Rouge. By mid afternoon, Michal, Matt, Alex and I met up with Ema at the airport and we all flew back to London for a two-day hangover-comedown experience.