In September 2014 there was FIVB Men’s World Championship organized in Poland. One of the games 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 started early in the morning to arrive around 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 was a little smaller and it was easier to walk through the whole area. In the main area, construction of the Africa building had started, which would be nice to see when they finished the work.
We accidentally 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 the animals’ health. It seemed it was popular here because the bears did some kind of special tricks that invited people to do that.
Unfortunately this zoo was 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 a disappointment was the tall hedges and walls around the animal enclosures that did not allow the kids to see the animals. We needed to lift them up to show what’s inside.
Our accommodation was near 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 would go to the game and the rest of the family would spend the time another way.
First we visited an ice cream shop, then we went to watch the Multimedia Fountain located near Centennial Hall. Kids could soak their feet in water. Just before the match started, we went to the fan zone to watch a part of game there. There were some contests and fun for the audience. I wanted to show kids what kind of fun it is to watch a volleyball game in public. Then we planned to go to the hostel to 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 answered that we didn’t have any. 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 and 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 value of the tickets we got was about 800 PLN. That way we 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 the whole family, we watched the game until the end. The kids had a chance to be in the center of the action and became a part of this noisy and big sport show. The kids enjoyed it very much — cheering and 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. The next day we wanted to have an intensive day too.
Be a part of that by watching our movie from that day: