Gdansk #1of2

Gdansk was first mentioned as a Polish city in about the year 999, and after WW I it was renamed Danzig, as it had been called at various periods of its history. The first shot fired in WW II, occurred in this city, and at the end of the war, it again became Gdansk, Poland.

We stopped at a gasoline station near the Gdansk harbor, for directions to the campground in Sopot, just north of Gdansk. They were pleased to meet Americans, and were so happy to help they gave me their only map, and would take no payment or tip. Now that we had a map, the campground, across the street from the Marina Hotel in Sopot, was not difficult to find.

We had met Henryk and Irena in the Warsaw campsite in 1985. They had visited their daughter Vicky in Southern California, and spent a night in our home in 1986, and here we are at their home in 1991. Gdansk was crowded with 14 story apartment buildings, and since we didn’t know how to find their apartment, we telephoned from a computer store, and found we were just across the street from their building. There were many large apartment buildings nearby. Can you imagine a 14 story building, 500 meters long? That’s 1,650 feet, a third of a mile. Another is even longer, 700 meters, nearly a 1/2 mile, with 13,000 residents. They call it “The ants nest.”

With Henryk as our private driver and guide, we headed for downtown Gdansk. He found a parking place near Glówne Miasto, the Old Town section of Gdansk. As in so many cities, extensive war damage has been repaired in as exact a manner as possible. We walked past buildings that had been repaired, and others that were in the process of painstaking duplication.

There are a couple of hundred steps to the top of the Cathedral steeple, and from there, we looked over the city. We drove past the home of Lech Welesa, the President of Poland. I got out of the car and took some pictures, and the guard asked us to move on.

The Oliwa Basilica, the oldest church in Gdansk, is most famous for its organ, originally built in the 1700’s, and has a large audience for a concert each day, including us, this day.

Henryk said that twice in his lifetime the Baltic has been frozen so thick, that people could walk or drive from Poland to Sweden.