If you immediately know the candlelight is fire…

It was the summer of 1995, I lived in Gdynia, Poland and was seven years old.

This was a formative trip for me, a time where I began to see there was another layer to the world than the surface.

At this point in my life, this was thirty one years ago so it’s tricky to piece together the full story of this trip, I don’t have any photos from it, all I have are my memories of people, moments and observations that stuck with me. And how these things affected me throughout my life.

This was the home I knew when I was seven years old, before the journey described in this story began.

Exact apartment not 100% sure, but it was the one with the balcony above the car port.

It was a 5am train ride with my classmates from the Gdynia Main station, it was summer but still very cold in the morning. Cold enough to see your breath on the air.

I remember waiting with my dad and grand dad at the platform, they were there to see me off.

The train had four seater cabins, I was in one with my classmates and the rest of the school trip in other carriages. Looking back, it was a lot like the opening scene of a Harry Potter film.

I remember annoying one of my classmates in the room and she kept telling me to go to sleep. “Idź spać!” she’d reply to something annoying I said, it became a phrase I associated with her for the whole trip and when we came back to school later.

My 14 yo neighbour Adam was on the trip too, as we were in the same school. Back then Polish schools used to just have primary and secondary in one massive building.

On weekends and holidays, we spent a bit of time together along with a girl his age from next door whose name I can’t remember anymore. I just remember she loved the Backstreet Boys and had a poster of them on her wall.

In hindsight it was unusual for kids my neighbours age to hang out with someone half their age, but maybe they found me amusing or exotic, being a mixed race kid in post communist Poland.

I think the trip was to Kamienna Góra, but I could be wrong.. it was near the Czech border. I did some searching for possible accommodation and am pretty confident I found the place, but I could be wrong.

Based on the packages offered and photos of the nearby surrounds, I’m 90% sure this is the place:

When we arrived, we were assigned a 4 bed dorm room to share. The whole trip ate meals as a group and did a number of activities together, but we mainly stuck to our year groups with older kids sometimes helping watch over us.

On the first day at the dormitory, the entire school trip went on a walk together to the nearby forest. The teachers were keen to instil the path in our heads, so we could find our way back to the dorms if we went wandering.

The next day, my class went on a day trip to a chapel made of bones. I remember being really creeped out thinking these were all people once. And someone had taken the time to arrange them in patterns to line the walls.

The day after the bone chapel, we played a game called Szlaki in the forest. Szlaki (pronounced sh-la-kee) is like hide and seek but you create clues to find each other in the forest using chalk, sticks and whatever else you think works.

As we headed back from Szlaki, I found a cool looking stick on the ground. It was about the size and shape of a teenage girl’s deodorant can, with intricate patterns on the outside. At the time I thought I’d found someone’s lost carving. Maybe even an object of magic. I took that stick home with me, thinking I had a totem of power. In hindsight, I believe I was just carrying a stick that some bark beetles had eaten up.

After losing hard against the hiding team, we all gathered around a campfire behind the dorm and roasted sausages in a circle while someone sang on a guitar, I don’t remember if it was a teacher or a student. But I remember we sang along to a popular summer song “Lato czeka”.

One morning while we were in town buying junk food, I was bored so I spent my pocket money to buy a bunch of magazines that had free stick on tattoos in them and covered my arms and legs in them to look cool.

Those trips to the shops were also the first time I tried Hubba Bubba gum, until then I’d only had sugar free and really brittle chewing gum in the Phillipines. Hubba Bubba blew my mind. Not just the taste but the bubbles you could blow with it! I’d finally understood what was being depicted in Bugs Bunny and other cartoons when chewing gum bubbles were blown.

We went on another day trip to the Czech republic, to visit a place called the Skolne Miasto. I remember having to give my teacher my passport when our bus crossed the border.

When we arrived at our destination, I learned another new thing. It was a set of cliffs that had previously been eroded by water. There were ancient micro fossils of marine life on the walls. At the time I remember thinking it was ocean but in hindsight maybe it was an ancient lake.

After leaving the cliffs area, I remember wanting to buy a grilled cheesy baguette from a cafe, but not knowing how to speak the language so i just pointed and hoped we could communicate and he wouldn’t cheat me.

I think the cafe might have been in a town called Trutnov, which was on the way between places we visited. I remember being able to see the mountains in the distance and there being a semi urban feel to the town.

When I went outside, my neighbour Adam looked at me and said “Of course Paweł has food. Where and how did you get that from?”. When other kids saw me with the item, they were stoked and went in and got one too.

The trip ended with a big disco downstairs. The dining room was cleared of furniture and turned into a dancefloor where the kids let loose to Fun Factory and other european 1990s bands, hit songs at the time.

Adam convinced me to go downstairs shirtless and dance like that to show off my tattoos. I got away with it for a few minutes but one of the teachers was not happy and sent me back to my room to put a shirt on.

I kept the cool stick I’d found and showed it to a few relatives. I was convinced it was handmade and represented some kind of secret knowledge. The adults were not convinced.

At some point I couldn’t find the stick anymore, I think my parents had thrown it away. That was probably the right move if it was just a dirty stick from the forest floor.

A few years ago, I threw away most of my childhood photos because I rejected the parent taking the picture. Now I am reclaiming my childhood by restoring it with artefacts from my personal history and the power of the human brain to reconnect and awaken what has been dormant.