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Most people have their reasons for picking a favourite:

• It’s the first place I visited
• It’s scenic/has a lot of history/…
• The people are wonderful

Mine is a combination of the above, but the precise moment when I fell in love with the place has to do with my love for the movies.

Gdansk was indeed the first place I visited outside of India. I went there for some project meetings nearly ten years ago and one of my Polish colleagues came to the airport to pick me up. I had heard that Polish was a slightly tough language to master, so I asked my colleague Karolina how the name of the city was pronounced. Her explanation can be summarized as follows: The G in the beginning is pronounced, the d is soft and there’s an implicit i before the n. Guh-dayinsk. More or less.

In the Polish alphabet, the n used in Gdansk has a tail attached to it (like so: ɲ), which is how you know to add the i in front when you pronounce it. She explained that this letter was called Ni.

And added, by way of clarification: “Like the Knights who say Ni.”

Game, set and match.