Proustian Waffles

Fourteen years ago, when I arrived for my secondment in Brussels and was looking for a place to live, I remember wondering why I was making life so difficult for myself - not just doing law, but doing law in French!  I wondered how I could make things even more difficult and imagined this would be doing chemical engineering in Polish in Gdansk.  Brussels was summed up by the smell of waffles in the snow.  Here in Gdansk today I saw a waffles ('gofry') stall.  The waffle connection brought the Brussels thought back and fourteen years slipped away.

As a footnote, I was wrong.  Gdansk is a delight.  Though the chemical engineering in Polish might have been a bit of a challenge.

Palaces of Post

We've been visiting post offices in Warsaw, Minsk, Moscow (Nick), St. Petersburg, Vilnius and now here in Gdansk.  We've seen some incredible ex-soviet Palaces of Post - huge covered amphitheatres of unattended counters, unfathomable ticketing systems, unsmiling officials and marble columns.  Buying a stamp is a major production.  But they're part of real life and we wouldn't have missed them.

Warsaw

Minsk

Gdansk

Glówne Miasto

Afternoon spent sight-seeing in the Glówne Miasto: Żurow Gdański (Gdansk crane), Brama Chebnicka (Gate of Bread-Sellers), Brama Zielona (Green Gate), ul. Długa and Długi Targ, Dwór Artusa (Arthur's Court), the Fontanna Neptuna, the Złota Kamienica, the Town Hall, Dom Uphagena, Brama Złota (Golden Gate), Dwór św. Jerzego (St. George's Court) and Brama Wyźynna (Upland Gate).  We went into two Basilicas - Kósciól Mariacki and Kósciól św. Mikołaja.  The former is beautiful and features brilliant statues and an extraordinary astronomical clock.  It's a fabulous, energising city.

Dwór Artusa -
Renaissance stove showing Lutheran sympathies

Fine Moustaches

Gingerbread and Amber

Lovely lunch on the waterfront - I bought some gingerbread from the shop on ul. Mariacka where Copernicus's 'house-keeper', Anna Schilling, used to live, to go with our coffee.  Later, we bought some amber - turns out the German word for this is 'Bernstein'.

Spruce

In another etymological news item, it emerges that 'spruce' comes from the Polish 'z Prus' ('from Prussia') - the good merchants of Hanseatic Gdansk used to export tons of the stuff.

Lenin Shipyards and Solidarność

Before lunch, we went out to the former Lenin Shipyards, so famously on tv at the beginning of the 1980s as the scene of the Solidarność strikes.  On the way, we happened upon a 'Roads to Freedom' underground exhibition - an excellent, moving account of that historical moment.  Watching Wałęsca, Jaruzelski, John Paul II etc brought it all back.  It's hard to credit absolutely the exhibition's claim that the Solidarity strikes 'led directly' to the fall of the Berlin Wall, but undoubtedly they showed (a) that something could be done and (b) that communist totalitarianism did not go completely unchallenged.  Very poignant to see the 'dominos' of the former iron curtain states that fell - and we appreciated again the exceptionality of Gorbachev.  There's a monument down at the shipyards themselves - incongruously we found ourselves there at the same time as three nuns.

Fabulous Gdansk

Wow!  I was imagining a grim, industrial city but Gdansk is an exquisite array of Renaissance / Hanseatic houses, the sunshine made crisp by the Baltic breeze.  We spent most of the morning on admin things - our last Palace of Post, hiring a car and visiting bookshops (English Unlimited and Empik).  In the course of it, I learned my Russian GCSE grade - A* - yay!