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.