Girls' outing @ Primitive , Gdansk

On Friday night we went out for a girls' outing. I'd been excited about for the whole week, first of all every chance to leave home makes me exultant and also I was about to meet my friends I hadn't seen for almost a year. But this was a bad evening from the very beginning. We arranged to meet in Gdansk, in Balzac, but every single seat was taken (hoards of foreigners everywhere, I didn't know I lived in such a touristy place) so we tried to find some other place. We ended up in a restaurant called the Primitive, and the primitive it was indeed. Don't ever try to cross the threshold of that establishment. At the first glance the place looked acceptable, cave -like decorations produced by a mediocre interior designer (such things are always a matter of taste as one of my friends seemed to like it), but the remaining part of the night explains why this was the only place we could find somewhere to sit and talk.

We were greeted by a nice waiter, who led us to a sturdy wooden table and offered us a laminated menu which consisted of unimaginative dishes called in lots of fancy ways like the Flinstones' dinner or caveman's kebab, troglodyte's fish and chips. The names were supposed to be funny and match the decor, but they actually put us off as we pictured a spiceless, underdone leg of  pork, dripping fat or raw beef or ungutted fish and other rather unappetising delicacies. So we went for a safe option - pizza. This was off  cause there was no cheese left, and so were most other dishes from the menu (the reason was different each time). We ended up having a few portions of chips. Imagine our surprise when they arrived. Each chip was different: small, large, straight, crinkled and also each portion was cooked in a different way. Mine were the tiny leftovers from the bottom of the packet, deep-fried brown, the girls had a very pale and non-crispy option of microwaved chips. Both were disgusting. The menu listed a 7 -beer range out of which one was available, and this was the awful corporational beer - Tyskie.

But food was not the worst thing that evening. Next to our table there sat a group of 6-7 Portugese tourists, they were enjouyng themselves, so were we. Suddenly there came a suspicious looking guy, sat at the table near them. My friend noticed that he was digging in the pocket of one of the Portugese guys' jackets hanging on the back of the chair. Since the guy looked rather dangerous and we, being the citizens of this city who might have enough bad luck to cross his path again, chose to report this theft to the waiter immediately. To uor suprpise the waiters reacted in such a clumsy way that the thief escaped. And it was enough to lock the door of the restaurant and wait for the police. I guess the Portugese did not understand why we didn't shout out that one of them was being robbed and I must say I don't understand it myself.  The whole situation makes me sick.

This completely destroyed our mood. The conversation circled around criminal topics, which later gave me bad dreams, we didn't feel like going home, but the party was definitely over. Since there was no more beer left in the restaurant we were forced to leave. On the way home we were stopped by the police, cause our friend who was driving us home drove so slowly and carefully that the policemen thought she was drunk. In a strange way this whole disastrous evening was only a tangible manifestation of our relationships falling apart. And paradoxically saved us from the prolonged, uncomfortable silences which would inevitably fall between us.