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Last week Warsaw was basking in sunshine, but the last couple of days have been very cloudy and dreary (whilst the UK has a heat wave I understand). There's not that much to do here in the sunshine, but there's even less in the rain. We had headed out to the playground in the morning, hoping the clouds would lift, but it started to spit as soon as we put Phoebe on the swing and soon the rain was too heavy for us to stay outside. And for the rest of the day we were more or less stuck indoors as the rain poured down. This is unusual for Indiana at this time of year. But the gods of dark sitcom conspire to ensure this holiday is as weird as possible.
It reminded me of my own childhood family holidays when wet weather would intervene and I was stuck trying to make the best of it in our tent or in the camp arcade. It's somehow much more oppressive to be trapped indoors when you're supposed to be on holiday. But even the smell of the rain on the dry earth was the same and it conjured up memories of eating big slabs of French white chocolate and chicken in a basket and playing on half-working pinball machines. And that part became literally the same as there is a small arcade in the hotel with some mainly ancient machines, most of which are broken. Sadly no Addams Family Pinball but they have a Star Wars one, which you can put coins in, but the start button doesn't work, a football world cup one that I've played before, where the flippers don't have the requisite strength and another one based on a rip off of Cluedo which more or less works well enough to play a decent game on. Even though I don't fully understand what's going on and it was very hard to direct the ball to the right hand side of the table, I quickly got the high score. And I suspect I will hold it forever now. My initials now come up every time the slot machine feature plays on the little video screen. So I am immortal in Warsaw. Unless you want to travel here and try to beat me. If you do, then email me and I will give you the hotel address.
There's a few other machines like a Galaga/Ms Pacman doubler that won't accept coins and a car racing game with a coin stuck in the slot so you can't play it, and that shooting game (that I used to play on arcades and then got on an early home video system) where you're a cop shooting at criminals, initially in a bank and then later on in moving cars and then an airport. You have to be careful not to shoot the innocent bystanders. It's still good fun.
There is also a machine I haven't seen before and which I don't think I'd want to play, which is also gun based, but takes place on safari and where (I assume) you have to kill animals. I guess there's a chance that you might be shooting poachers which would feel less morally reprehensible. I am not sure this game made it to the UK. My wife couldn't believe it existed. It is odd, I suppose, when I was happy to shoot digital representations of human beings in the police one, but then again, within the logic of the game, they were shooting at me and were bad people. To try and bag some noble and innocent animals, even in a pretend video game, seems like an odd choice.
My daughter had picked up my fascination with the games room and keeps wanting to go in. At the moment she's a cheap date as she's happy to just press the buttons and turn the steering wheel and has no compunction to murder a pretend baboon to know what it would be like to kill a pretend man.
