In September 2014 there was FIVB Men’s World Championship organized in Poland. One of the game was in Wroclaw, Poland. Ann wanted to cheer and decided to buy tickets for her and her parents. After a while we thought it would be great to go there with family and explore Wroclaw city.
Wrocław is 180km away from Poznań. The road is average quality, goes through many small towns, and that’s why it took about 3 hours to complete. We have started early in the morning to arrive about a noon.
Along the way we found beautiful decorations in one of the towns, made for the end of harvest. We stopped for a while to watch them. In Poland there are a lot of village parties organized to celebrate the end of the harvest. Those decorations were created to encourage people to join. We found puppets and animals made from bundles of hay. It’s quite unique.
Our visit to Wrocław started with dinner in restaurant, then we went to the Wroclaw ZOO. It is very similar to the one we visited in Poznań, it is a little smaller and it is easier to walk through the whole area. In the main area, construction of the Africa building had started that will be nice to see when they finish the work.
Accidentally we noticed that visitors were feeding the animals. There were signs that said ‘Do not feed’, but they did. It was not cool and we were worried about animals health. It seems it is popular here because bears did some kind of special tricks that invites people to do that.
Unfortunately this zoo is poorly equipped for kids. All we noticed for them were strollers that could be borrowed near the entrance. We can put children inside and pull them around if they are exhausted, but that is not enough, especially on a crowded day. Another thing that was disappointment was tall hedges and walls around the animal enclosures that did not allow kids to watch the animals. We needed to lift them up to show what’s inside.
Our accommodation was nearby Centennial Hall where in the evening FIVB game was played. On that day there were two games, one of them, the most interesting for us, was between Poland and Cameroon. Hour by hour more people were coming.
Our plan was that Ann with her parents is going for a game and the rest of the family would spend the time another way.
First we have visited ice cream shop, then we went to watch Multimedia Fountain located nearby Centennial Hall. Kids could soak their feet in water. Just before match has started we went to the fan zone to watch a part of game there. There was some contests and fun for audience. I wanted to show kids what kind of fun it is to watch volleyball game in public. Then we planned to go to hostel for a sleep.
Kids wanted to get some fan gadgets. They saw everywhere around them that people were wearing white and red. I decided to buy one item per child. Girls had funny hats and Kris had a scarf with “Polska” (“Poland”) on it. We also painted our faces in red and white. We also bought a trumpet that was very quickly adopted by Justine who played it all the time. With all of that stuff we’ve entered fan zone, kids began to dance, having fun and everyone was watching us. Few minutes later some guy from Polsat TV came to us and asked if we have tickets to go inside the hall. We have answered that we didn’t have them. Then he asked if we want to get tickets because he had some and couldn’t go inside because he needed to go somewhere else now an he wanted to give us those tickets because he saw how our kids were having fun. At first I thought he wanted to sell those tickets, but when he came again with tickets and didn’t want any cash for them, we were very happy. It was like winning the lottery. The total cost of the tickets we got was about 800 PLN. That way we’ve got tickets for a game that we didn’t expect. There was half an hour until the game started. Bugger me!
Now we needed to go buy T-shirts to look like real fans. We ran to the stand and bought everyone fan outfit. Now only one task was left — to find their mother inside the hall…
Until the break we couldn’t find a way to do that. There was about 8000 people inside and each of them was wearing the same colors. During the break we found grandparents who were going to the restroom. We caught them and we sat together.
With whole family we saw the game until the end. Kids had a chance to be in the center of action and became a part of this noisy and big sport show. Kids enjoyed it very much, were cheering, singing loudly. It was amazing that all of this was unplanned.
We came to the hostel very late and went to sleep as soon as possible. Tomorrow we wanted to have intensive day too.
Be a part of that by watching our movie from that day: