I'm surprised to read they had an actual physical office you _could_ show up :)

was it a very distant location to head out to?

It was some address in Warsaw, so if I needed that domain badly, it'd be one Ryanair flight away, and definitely an interesting experience :) But I was only using it for a small blog, so I just let it expire. I hoped I would be able to register it again immediately after it expires, but some scammers beat me to it (probably scanning for expiring domains with good reputation/SEO), so last time I checked, the domain is used to advertise some magic pills.

Now I am curious. Was that registrar "nazwa.pl"?

No. Nazwa may be a bait-and-switch scam when it comes to pricing, but they are a big registrar that has to play by the rules set by NASK. I used a small "PHP+MySQL+email+domain" provider, that (as I later learned) was so small they didn't want to fork out a few grands a year to NASK to be a proper registrar themselves, so they instead used another (still shady) registrar under the hood.