FINAL UPDATE
Okay, time's up. Let's do this. Sorry for the hold up, we were very busy. Pics are in the spoilers cause there are a lot of them.
It all started upon the arrival of Fish, weary after a 24 hour flight, meeting Sagi at Krakow airport, and thusly we enjoyed lugging around the city in the heat.
We had pljeskavica.
We had beer.
We had some more beer.
There was pollen. In our beer. And our pljeskavica.
And in the air all around us. It was a blur of a day.
First selfie
The next day Kinley appeared, bearing gifts of retro British lollies and also bearing around in general - as he is, as we all expected, a bear.
View of Wawel Castle
The next few days were adventurous and involved beer and pollen. But most importantly Polen, of course.
Kinley learned that Australians don’t know how to measure travelling in time but have a sense of direction vastly superior to his own. And of a concept known as the macca’s run’.
And what a 5 zloty coin looks like.
Australian beanie fan tasting lard and pickle for the first time.
“you’re supposed to have lots of froth”
“no you’re not”
“whatever, kurwa”
Sagi’s English was also deeply contested while we were stocking up for a night of homemade 25 year old palinka and pizza. This isn’t important but I feel like it needs to be included in this post regardless.
[get the bottle segment - technical problems]
The next day we squeezed ourselves in a crowded and hot tram to travel to the main event of the Kraków meeting - The Witcher 3 music concert in Tauron Arena.
At Tauron Arena
Our feelings are basically described in the summary video, which you can watch it here
[
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRX3XHqS89Y]
Kinley held Sagi’s hand, while they both sobbed during Ciri finding scene. True story. :^)
After the concert we met up with
@Gilthoniel and her friend (forum lurker), and together we ventured to House of Beer. Our group wasn’t too big, thanks to the beloved Czech and Serb abandoning the idea of coming to Poland, but we had a pleasant conversation and great craft beer. What more would you want?
Sadly, we were tasting our great beers so intensively, that we forgot to take pictures (especially the whole group). The one below is the only pic from the pub we have. The dark drunk selfie.
House of Beer
And the next morning, palinka bottle run dry, it was The Day We Had Been Waiting For.
We had some confusion in the lead up to reaching CD Projekt RED’s office, but by Melitele’s grace we were only five minutes late and ended up, keen as little beans, waiting for our dear friend Marcin “Dr. House” Momot to limp into view.
Here at last.
Autism struck face of Sagi with his (and yours) creation on the wall in the food area.
We sold our souls to CD Projekt RED, so we can’t really write much about what happened next. Sorry, guys. But what we can tell you, is that the studio looks pretty much like what you see in the developer diaries. After the tour led by the ever so lovely BANAN we sat down in the canteen quite a few devs you know and love, including Miles Tost, Philip “Benzerzimmern” Weber, Damien Monnier, MPG and Jose Treixera wandered in and stopped for a chat with us. Worth mentioning that Mr. Blacha made an attempt to join us but was sadly busy with a meeting. We amassed quite a group and we thought it couldn’t get any better, but suddenly a golden figure appeared. The big man himself - Marcin Iwiński. We shook hands, talked for a while and took a Pulitzer prize worthy photo, you can see below. Iwinski’s hands are very soft and he looks a lot like a human pillow please don’t tell him.
Image portraying Mr. Iwinski’s softness
After we left, we made a really poor effort to find a kebab place Marcin recommended us and instead went to some delightfully capitalistic food court to settle our missed vegetarian canteen needs (but with meat, of course).
We then set out to find the Alchemist, which happened to not be too far from our hostel, so we managed to have a short tour of some of Warsaw’s sights, narrated by Sagi’s poor (sensual) knowledge of Polish history and relax a little by ourselves and gear up to disguise ourselves as fellow devs before we relaxed with the real deal.
Marcin and Miles, waiting outside for us with his stick looking like a cheery version of Hugh Laurie’s Doctor House, invited us in, Philip joined us shortly after. We chatted until midnight, about anything and everything, while having some delicious food and brew from the beer wall that flowed like the Yaruga, all courtesy of our awesome host Marcin.
The crew at The Alchemist
We got back to our place, sharing warm goodbyes with our RED companions and next day we came back to Kraków (sleepy) to use the time we had left the best we could.
smirk
Sleepy memes
Visiting the old Jewish Cemetary.
Attractions in Krakow.
Visiting Wojtek the Soldier Bear statue
Early morning waifu session :^)
Skype session with other fellow forumites ( @Sephira and @KingHochmeister)
Checking out a Krakowian Market
Goodbyes are never easy.
We had a great time and we are pretty sure we will repeat it in the future.
Tagging people who waited for the report
@Sunsibar
@gregski
@volsung
@Dragonbird
@Bellator Pius Gratus
@eskiMoe
@Riven-Twain
@Alan989
@wichat
@TemerianGirl
@Marcin Momot
@Benzenzimmern