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.
Wroclaw is 180km away from Poland. Road is average quality, goes through many small cities, thats the reason it took about 3 hour to complete. We have started early in the morning to arrive about a noon.
By the way we found in one of cities beautiful decorations made for end of harvest time. We stopped for a while to watch them. In Poland we have a lot of village parties that are organized to celebrate end of harvesting. Those decorations was created to encourage people to join. We found puppets and animals made from bundles of hay. It’s quite unique.
Our visit in Wroclaw has started by taking a 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 bit smaller and it is easier to walk through whole area. In the main area there was started a building of Africa building that will be nice to watch when they will finish work.
Accidentally we noticed that people who were visiting ZOO did feeding to animals. There was signs that calls “Do not feed”, but they did. It was not cool and we were worried about animals health. It seems it is popular here because beers did some kind of special tricks that invites people to do that.
Unfortunately this zoo is poorly prepared for kids. All we noticed for them was a trolleys that might be borrowed nearby entrance. We can put children inside and pull them around if they are exhausted, but there is not enough, especially on crowded day. Another thing that was disappointment was tall hedges and walls around animal runs that does not allow kids to watch 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, on of them, most interesting for us, was between Poland and Cameroon. Hour by hour more of people was coming here.
Our plan was that Ann with her parents is going for a game and rest of family will spend time other 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 that people was wearing white and red. I decided to buy them one gadget per child. Girls had funny hats and Kris had a scarf with “Polska” (“Poland”) on it. Additionally we painted our faces with red and white colors. Also we bought a trumpet that was very fast adopted by Justine who played on that 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 have some and he can’t go inside because he need to go somewhere else now an he want to give us those tickets because he saw how our kids was having fun. Firstly I thought that he wanted to sell those tickets, but when he came again with tickets and don’t wanted any cash for them we was very happy. It was like a win on lottery. Overall cost of those tickets we’ve got was about 800 PLN. That way we’ve got tickets for a game that we didn’t expect. There was half an hour to game start. Bugger me!
Now we needed to go buy T-shirts to looks like a real fans. We ran to the stand and bought everyone fan outfit. Now only one task left, to find mother inside the hall…
Till the break we didn’t find the way to do that. There was about 8000 people inside and each of them was wearing same colors. During the break we found grandparents that was going to restroom. We’ve catch 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, was cheering, singing loud “up heart Poland will win the match”. It was extreme that all of that 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: