Bicycle, Bicycle, Bicycle.

When we were in Valencia, both Cynthia and I had bikes. I was none too fond of mine, and I think it could sense this, because after a while it started trying to kill me. We lived in this state of mutual animosity for more than a year, with it developing new wobbles and problems as fast as it could, and me threatening to throw the damn thing off the roof at every opportunity, until late one night it was stolen. Frankly, I was about glad to be rid of the accursed infernal money-eating contraption of the devil.

The problem came about in the next few days as I found that, having become accustomed to moving about the city at a certain pace, walking was just annoyingly slow. Jaunts that should have taken me 4 - 5 minutes took 20-25. And after so long on the bike, walking now seemed like more exertion than it might be worth (unless we were going to the beach.) On top of all that, I missed the city-as-obstacle-course challenge that having a bicycle lent to my day.

It had taken me some time to begin to appreciate the fun that could be derived from going about town at a terrible break-neck speed, hopping curbs, dodging dogs, skidding around corners, playing chicken with cars, whizzing by right next to people and hearing them scream in alarm and dive for cover. In the same way as having a motorcycle, it fundamentally changed the way you looked at the terrain in front of you. You had to constantly gauge the narrowing distances between people and objects, the slowly increasing distance between one person and another, and calculate the quickly decreasing distance between you and the target (ahem, person, I mean) and make split-second decisions about which side of the old lady you would go on. It was a lot like shopping in Wal-Mart on a Saturday afternoon, but you're the only one with the cart, and at 50 times the speed.

So I decided I would have to buy another bike. I did, buying the cheapest one I could find, since we were out of there in a couple of months anyway. It was too small for me, not very nice, but extremely light, and it got me where I wanted to go. Upon leaving I sold it to the director of our school, who functioned as a sort of clearing-house for bikes. He would buy them up, and the new teachers who arrived could buy them from him.

When we arrived here in Poland, Cynthia made mention of the fact that I should get a bike. So did about 14 other people. I told them that it was possible, but not likely, that such a thing would happen, and when they saw a star in the East, or the Devil was seen buying thermals, that would be the sign that I had bought a bike.

Of all my classes, I have only one that is a one-on-one class. I go to the big department store, and go to the office of the store dyrektor. Three times a week He and I speak for an hour, and then I go down, do some shopping and leave. Not infrequently he plies me with "breakfast," which is normally an open faced sandwich of smoked salmon, or gives me bottles of fiery-liquids, or gives me 4 feet of homemade Polish sausage. So it was nothing unusual when he offered to get me a reduced price on a bicycle. I thanked him graciously, and told him I would think about it. After some perusal of what his store had on offer, I was thinking of declining. The cheap bicycles were too cheap, and the expensive ones were too costly for something I love as little as a bicycle.

However, a week later he handed me brochure of nothing but bicycles, (similar to a wally-world publication) which they would be receiving soon. Therein I found what looked like a nice mix of features at an appropriate cost, and acquiesced. I received 20% off the already reduced sales-price, and was told that it would be here in 4 days. He even asked me what color I would like, since he thought the advertised yellow was, in his words, "A little gay." I told him the color wasn't important to me, and so I ended up with silver.

The first thing I noticed upon mounting my new bicycle, is that my legs are OUT OF SHAPE. It didn't used to hurt nearly this much to ride on flat ground. My goodness, my legs need some work. I hadn't thought about it before, but most of my exercise over the winter months had been phenomenally good for my upper-body, (pull-ups, mainly,) and neglected my lower-body almost completely. Well, now is the day of reckoning.

I am beginning to recapture the joy of riding down innocent pedestrians, dodging cars and hopping curbs. It certainly makes the trip to work more interesting. On a side-note, this bike is different from my previous ones. The previous ones were of a traditional design, and on this one the rear wheel is a separate piece from the frame, on a hinged arm with a large spring that goes back to the frame, which makes it a lot easier to jump off of and back onto higher things, without so much jarring to the bike. On the downside, the bike is extremely heavy. However, no doubt with time I will get used to it.

Cynthia is already insisting that we must bicycle to Slovakia this summer. I counter that just because I made one mistake, (buying the bicycle,) does not mean I will be conned into making another. But she already knows who is going to win.

Gdansk - Malbork Castle

Ever heard of Gdansk? What about Danzig? One is famous for being the birthplace of the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) movement in Poland, that propelled an shipyard electrician to eventual presidentship, (which reminded many why electricians, no matter how good their intentions, are best left as electricians.) The other is remembered as a "Free City" located smack in the middle of Poland, but with mostly German inhabitants, which was a quasi-independent "Free State" under the treaty of Versailles. The Germans in the 30's were bargaining for a "Danzig Corridor" cutting through Polish territory, when they decided it was too much bother, and so took all of Poland instead. And, Gdansk and Danzig are one and the same city.

The reason the city is well-known by two different names is that the Teutonic knights, (whose self-appointed task was to spread Christianity by the sword into already Christian but-not-under-German-control areas) had the entertaining habit of giving all the places they conquered German names which often had far less resemblance to the original than that shared by Gdansk and Danzig. Thus when anyone attempted to report back to the Holy Father about any abuses, the Pope could say with a straight face "the city you mention is not listed among Teutonic dominions."

When the Teutonic Knights conquered an area, they would often often enslave the people there. One handy way to do this was to collect all the millstones in the area. Then they issued a decree that all wheat grown would be sold to them (at their prices,) which they then ground and sold back to the populace, (again at their prices.) By removing the link between a people's labor and their food, they placed themselves in direct control of the subjugated people's economic and physical fate. A captured population that bordered on Germany could expect to survive about 16 years before they would die off completely from hard labor and lack of adequate nutrition. Good Christian (German) farmers would then be brought in to work the land, and this place would now be officially Christianized.

The knights ruled the area from what was at that time their headquarters - called Marienburg, or Mary's Fortress. Today it is called Malbork. It consists of a tremendously fantastically super-duper large castle made of red brick, which was built in three stages. The first area is a square construction of 3 stories (above ground) which surround a small courtyard containing a deep well. This was the original fortress, and was massive enough that Cynthia and I spent most of the day in this relatively limited area. The second area was built later, and is an expansion of the first, that encompasses it. The last addition was mainly large additional buildings not contiguous with the main structure. All of this is nestled in about 4 rings of walls and battlements and ramps and drawbridges and portcullises that can make your head spin.

An odd thing about the fortress, from a tourist's point of view, is the lack of any signs on doors indicating that their might be an exhibition worth seeing within. The result is that you wander about freely, occasionally wandering into areas obviously under repair, and out again, until you see people emerging from some unmarked door, and think to yourself "Let's give that a go." When you open the door you find yourself standing in a tiny antechamber, which has 3 doors leading off and a staircase leading up. So you try all 3 doors. Two of them are locked, and one leads into a closet. So you go up the stairs, past some more locked doors. But when you keep pushing on random doors, always expecting to wander into somebody's office, one eventually swings open, and you are in a room full of armor, swords, old cannons, or a room with great pieces of amber jewellery, boxes covered with amber that were owned by kings, pre-historic amber jewellery across the room from very modern pieces on loan from collections. Eventually you wander out again, and go back to jiggling handles on random doors until one opens under your hand, and you find yourself in the hall where the knights held meetings. The room is lined on all sides with benches, which turn into armed chairs as you move toward the head of the room. The Grand Master's chair is easy to pick out, as it is the most impressive. In the corners of the room, interrupting the continous benches, and separating the head of the room from the rest, are cabinets with demon-like half-human-half-monster creations running down the sides of the doors. The floors are tiled in patterns, and many of the tiles show dragon motifs, or knights, or heroic animals.

Every corner of the place is loaded with detail. In corridors, in the corners of windows you find small glazed mushrooms sprouting, or a dog eating a snake eating the dog worked into the base of a column, while the ceiling has paintings and the fireplace mantel shows the heathen Lithuanians getting their just deserts from the noble Teutonic knights, who have crosses upon thars.

To cut a centuries long story short, the Pope eventually came to feel that monastic states with immense temporal holdings could be competition for the Vatican's racket, (similar business model, different methods) and so over the next 3 hundred years they slowly withered away. In 1809 they ended the military chapter of their history when Napolean told them it was over. In 1929 they became a normal monastic order.

This history explains a bit why Gdansk has two crosses on its coat of arms - the crosses reflect the Teutonic knights influence on the city. The other influence was the sea, and ships. Gdansk was a major sea port throughout its various incarnations. One of the most famous sights in Gdansk is the "Crane" which was the world's largest crane for loading and unloading ships. The crane (seen in the right-hand picture below in the distance as a protruding brown structure on the left ) was powered by people inside working like hampsters on giant exercise wheels. As a human-powered dock crane, I suppose it was impressive. The guidebooks all certainly thought so. Since the crane was just around the corner and along a canal from the Long Market street, where we and our friends spent most of our time anyway, and since we discovered a coffee shop almost next to the crane in which to have daily post-breakfast-coffee-cofee, we ended up walking by and around the crane a fair bit.

Gdansk - Long Market Street

Long Market street, like most of the streets in Poland which were the focus of some attention by the Germans and Russians in the late 1930's and early 40's, was once reduced to utter rubble. But there the similarity ends. Long Market street has been painstakingly restored to it's pre WWII condition. Some buildings could tell you the exact number of original bricks used in the reconstruction (547 out of 681.) We tended to wander in that direction every day, as it had fantastic architectural styles represented, with stunning details of in different parts of the building, and interesting (though expensive) shops on the ground floor, plus a ton of good restaurants located in the cellars.

Many of the shops on the street focused on the amber trade. Amber is a big business along the Balkan coast, as it will literally wash up on the shores after a storm. Apparently some millions of years ago, there were massive conifer forests which never had time to properly rot before they were suddenly submerged. Then as time and water and earth moved, the resin in the trees fossilized. Nowdays along the edge of the Baltic there are dredging operations to unearth it. The Russians prefer dynamiting to dredging, although this reduces the size and value of the pieces they recover, and destroys everything in the immediate vicinity with its pointless focus on short-term profits, which seems to be what defines the Russian style of doing most things.

I bought a small bit of Amber on the road to Hel. Halfway to Hel, and bordering the Baltic, is Gydnia. Cynthia and I walked along the wharf in Gydnia, and I spotted a small plastic bucket of loose, unfinished amber pieces being sold. The price was minimal, so I bought 5 small pieces. I wondered at the time what techniques there were for evaluating amber. How easy is it to make amber-like pieces of plastic? I decided to make it a chemistry project when I got home, and see if they were real or not.

We had a lot of time to kill that day, since we had arrived in Gydnia a full hour and a half before the last bus to Hel. Which was also the last bus from Hel. So if we had gone there, we would have been stuck in Hel. Considering that the following day would be Easter Sunday, and no trains would be running the next day, we might have been stranded for some time. So we decided that Hel was not for us, and passed the afternoon in Gydnia, walking on the beach, bathing my bald head in the Baltic, eating Chinese food and lounging in an Irish pub. Fortunately for me, I had bought a new book that morning before we left, and so was able to lounge and read for quite some time. It felt quite good to have nothing to do for the afternoon except catch a train back to Gdansk.

While we were futilely trying to reach Hel, our poor friends were fruitlessly trying to mount the ramparts at Malbork, having been turned back by the guards mannng the drawbridge. So they spent the afternoon wandering around the exterior walls, traipsing over bridges and taking pictures of it's brick immensity.

Our friend Sarah had planned to come and spend a few of her vacation days with us. The night she arrived, about 10 minutes later 2 other friends, Peter and Rachel, simultaneously stepped around opposite sides of a large mirrored wall. It turned out that they had been planning for some weeks to surprise us, and by coincidence Cynthia and I had booked a room in the same hostel they had! (I guess this is what happens when everybody makes a stampede for the cheapest option.)

The hostel itself was a bit interesting. It was contained in a huge brick apartment building, which was hidden among about 11 other identical buildings. To get to the entrance you had to walk through all the buildings, toward a dead-end, then walk through a narrow alley between two buildings, which then led into a wall, where you again turned the corner and walked around the back of the building, where the brick walls are heavily peppered with what could only be bullet holes, (unless we are to assume that someone climbed a ladder and went on a mad spree with a drill all around three specific windows,) to find large wooden double-doors whose thickness had been augmented considerably over time with what must have been hundreds of layers of paint.

Upon opening the door, you faced a steep staircase about 16 feet high and 20 feet wide, in a dimly-lit, dust covered, high-ceilinged entryway, which created an interesting sense of dissonance upon entering it. The architecture and immensity of the entryway made you think you were entering a museum of some sort, but the general dimness and concrete compostion of the place said it must have seen its last visitor some time ago. Once you had surmounted the very wide and steep staircase, there was a much smaller area containing some random doors and an old-fashioned wood and glass enclosed booth, in which a small, round television set threw a blue light over an old man who would sometimes fix you with a baleful glare as you went past, and sometimes pretend to stay asleep. You then go up a wide, circular concrete staircase, to the next landing, where a Kuwaiti man is lounging upon a chair on the landing, one leg gracefully thrown over the other one, smoking a cigarette, resplendent at 4:00 in the afternoon in what are unmistakably gold and green striped silk pajamas.

The clientele and/or local color dropping by were definitely more interesting than the television that burbled away in the common/dining room. If a man in shiny striped silk pajamas is going to brighten your afternoons, it only makes sense that breakfast at 8:00a.m. should be attended by Elvis. Polish Elvis. Not just sporting the grand, swept-back, magnficently black pompadour and huge sunglasses, but also wearing those ridiculous sort of driving gloves that are made of very thin leather, have no fingers, and have holes cut out above each knuckle. Why you need driving gloves to manage your large stein of beer at 8 in the morning is probably no less pertinent a question than why you would wear giant sunglasses that cover half your face while you chat with your neighbors in their sitting-room.

But reminiscent of the first 5 minutes of a horror movie or not, it was home for three days, and in the end I was glad to see the final day come. Our final full day in Gdansk was a rainy one, and a Sunday at that. We awoke, met our friends in the hall, ate breakfast together at the hostel, coffee, toast and eggs, (colored eggs, of course,) and made our way through the dank and drizzle toward the coffee shop near the dock-crane. On the way, however, we were way-laid by the world's largest brick cathedral, which was in full Easter service. We stopped in and caught the last 10 minutes of the service, which featured organ music and a beautiful voice floating down from the heavenly reaches of the cathedral, and then wandered about the building, admiring the organ and the artwork. My personal favorite depicted a saint of the female persuasion in a large pot of liquid, with a man on either side of her. The one on the right was managing a pair of 4 foot pliers, with which he was pinching her breast, with intention to remove, (it appeared.) What struck me most about the whole scene was the impassivity on the three faces - no doubt due more to the deficiencies of the artistic techniques of the particular period than anything else, but beautifully incogruent nevertheless. Across from my favorite painting was one of the other great draws of this particular cathedral, which was an astronomical clock of astronomical complication. It had figures that would dance and move upon the hours, keep track of the movements of the sun and moon and dominant zodiac sign, and give you the current date, as well as simply tell you when you were late for lunch, or the priest was running long.

We finally made it to the coffee shop, and ensconced ourselves inside with coffees, and before long began reading. After about an hour, we moved to another place down the road, ordered more drinks, and read some more. At a bit past noon we took a much-needed break from this exhausting round-robin of restaurants and cafes to follow Peter down to the shipyards where Solidarity was birthed, and had its most dramatic moments. The memorial to the dockyard workers killed by the police were three gigantic, towering concrete anchors designed to be very reminiscent of crucifixes. The names of the dead workers were inscribed in brass with bullet holes shown through their names. On a grey and drizzly day, in an industrial area of the town, we five foreigners took a moment from our cafe au lait day to reflect briefly on men and women who were born to toil, and asking for something better, were imprisoned or shot for their pains. The momentum of their will, however, created fissures in the despotic regime that had crushed them, and in the end brought it down.

Then we turned, and walked until we found another restaurant, where we sat reading and talking, until night came. I had never passed a day in this way before, and I have to say I would recommend it, but for no longer than a day. Nothing quite like enforced leisure to foment introspection.