Wanderung 31

Once Around the Baltic

August - September 2016


 

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August 30: Gdansk (or Danzig), Poland

Since breakfast was not open until 7 am, we took some pictures right after sunrise as the Costa Pacifica entered the harbor at Gdynia. I saw a square-rigged tall ship, naval vessels, and even a submarine coming in to dock at the harbor, so clearly it is a naval base and possibly a naval training center as well as a freight harbor and cruise ship port. After a quick breakfast, we were greeted by a pretty rainbow right over the harbor as we returned to the balcony of our stateroom.

We gathered our belongings and met Linda and Jerry at 8:30 to proceed to the "ballroom", a rather grandiose title for a dance floor in one of the larger bars of the Costa Pacifica. There we were grouped together to be guided off the ship and onto our tour bus. Costa did feature a separate English language tour of Gdansk, for which we were all grateful, and "ENG" was clearly emblazoned on our tour tickets.

Our tour guide was a 20-something Polish woman studying to be lawyer, possibly financial, and told us that the Universities in Poland were free except maybe for medical school, where she mentioned a fee of about 1,500 Euros per year for a typical 6-year course of study.

We drove through the port city of Gdynia where we were docked, which was apparently a modern, rather high-rent district, and continued on through Sopot, an old spa area. Sopot had some nice old building facades on its Main Street and we just caught a glimpse of the Grand Hotel down on the Baltic shoreline.

Our bus ride ended in the central part of Gdansk. These three cities have a combined population of about 800,000 and are considered to be sister cities as they share the Baltic shoreline of Poland. However, our guide described them as having different main industries and each having a slightly different unique ambiance.

Gdansk, where our guided walk took place, was of course the historical central city of the area. As a Hanseatic German city called at the time Danzig, Gdansk had a rich commercial tradition including shipbuilding and international trade. One of the main trade items was amber, which is light, compact and extremely valuable! Even today we saw amber jewelry and other items in an almost overwhelming abundance in both the stores and the street vendors lining the avenues of the tourist areas of the old central part of town. If you want to buy amber, Gdansk would be one place to do it.

Although rather thoroughly destroyed by the Russians at the end of WWII, the old center of Gdansk was rebuilt exactly as the Hanseatic town of Danzig had looked like, and thus it had a very "old northern German city" look to me. We were let off the bus a bit South of The Green Gate (#8 on the map) and walked up to it on a promenade along the Motlawa River, where we saw a faux pirate ship and a Ferris wheel across the way.

The Green Gate was one of the old gates guarding the city back in Hanseatic times, and although built of brick it did in fact have a slight greenish tint to it. We continued up the river until we could see The Crane (#8 on map), which back in the Hanseatic days had been powered by men walking inside the crane in a squirrel-cage type of thing to power the hoist.

Turning westward, we wended our way to St Mary's Basilica (#6 on map), which our guide claimed was the largest brick church in the world and capable of holding 25,000 people (as it reportedly did when Pope John Paul II visited). The church was in fact so big that I could not take a picture of its exterior, and had to content myself with a picture of a bronze model of the church instead.

It was indeed spacious inside, but with 25,000 people that church must have packed them in like sardines! St Mary's was fortunate that only the roof burned during all the WWII bombing, so the walls were preserved intact. While cleaning the interior walls during restoration, some of the old wall frescoes had been uncovered. Those reminded me very much of the chalk wall paintings that we had seen on some of the old churches in Denmark during our bicycle tours there (Wanderung 30).


 


 

I was intrigued by the huge astronomical clock near the front of the church, a magnificent piece of work featuring a full calendar at the bottom, a clock in the middle, and statues of Adam and Eve at the top who move to actually ring the clock's bell.


 

Returning to the main historical thoroughfare of Dluga, we looked at the old Town Hall (#4 on map), which is now a museum I think. Just down the street we ended our tour at The Fountain of Neptune (#5 on map), which seemed to be considered something of a good luck charm by the locals and a place for hijinks on the part of international soccer players during the last world tournament.

Although the tour was officially over and we had an hour of free time, we followed our guide to a nearby Amber store where a young woman showed how to polish Amber using a very fine EP80 emery paper and a buffing wheel , both mounted on a bench grinder. Now I know how to do it!

Linda and Monika continued to look at all the kiosks selling amber jewelry and knicknacks as we walked westward to The Golden Gate (#2 on map), which was quite pretty but really more whitish than golden. Just outside that gate was the Prison Tower, part of the old town jail that has been now been converted into an Amber museum I was later told by our guide. We ambled back to The Green Gate enjoying the old, restored buildings lining both sides of the street. Linda and Jerry bought us all super-sized soft ice cream cones, which eased the onset of hunger considerably!

That snack was quite useful in staving off hunger while our group regathered, returned to the bus, and drove back to the ship. We arrived shortly after 2 pm, dropped our stuff off in our rooms, and were relieved to find the buffet lines still open as we were all quite hungry by then. After a bit of rest, Linda, Jerry and Monika tried their hand at musical trivia while I tried to update our trip journal before dinner. After dinner we stayed up for a performance of ABBA hits by a shipboard quartet consisting of a singer, two guitarists, and a keyboard player, and that was a bit of nostalgia for me. Monika and I then collapsed for the night , but Linda and Jerry had enough energy to try some of the other entertainment venues.



Copyright 2016 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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