Gdansk, Hel, and Westerplatte

Friday, August 1, 2008
After we returned from Krakow, we spent a couple of nights at home in Warsaw and then we visited Gdansk. My impressions of Gdansk: this is a working city, it is filled with lots of history, and is glad for tourists but they are not the top priority of the city. I was fascinated by the shipyards as we sailed past them on the ferry/water tram. The cranes waiting to offload cargo or move items onshore looked like duckbilled dinosaurs looking for a snack or water birds (maybe cranes!) waiting for a fish to swim by so they could make a meal. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting the Old Town of Gdansk. The buildings were beautiful and I loved the ornamentation on them. I’m still amazed when I see buildings that I know were built in the 1600’s—or earlier. Everything seems impossibly old, even when I have it on good authority that some things I see are reconstructions. I don’t know if that amazement will change while I’m in Poland.

We took the water tram to Hel. We had to make the trip. Elizabeth really wanted to be able to go to school and tell her friends that she “went to Hel and back” this summer. It is an interesting place with lots of little booths selling the same trinkets (OK, there were probably five different types of booths but you saw them repeatedly around town.) We walked to the lighthouse and climbed, and climbed, and climbed, and climbed some more. We finally reached the top and had a spectacular view, once the top cleared out a bit. I have to admit to a bit of claustrophobia when I got to the top. I suspect there were way too many people in that space. But over a period of a few minutes, it cleared a bit and we could look out and enjoy the view of sailboats, the water trams to Gdansk and Gdynia and the larger ferries headed toward Scandinavia. We bought the book about the history of the lighthouse—very interesting. That little spit of land has been important for navigation since about 890! As we waited for the water tram back to Gdansk, Elizabeth and I were looking into the water and are pretty sure we saw jellyfish. I need to do some research because I had never thought of jellyfish in the Baltic. Of course, until we moved to Poland, I must admit I never really thought about the Baltic. We took the water tram back to Gdansk and had the best meal (we each had a different kind of fish) of our vacation week. We decided to splurge a bit and had a great time eating our fish dinners and sitting on the front porch of the restaurant watching all the “goings on” on the waterfront.

The last thing we did before leaving Gdansk was to drive out to Westerplatte. This is the place where the first shots of World War II were fired. There is an impressive monument erected on the hill but two things have been left that really illustrated the war to me. One was a gun platform that faces the channel from the harbor to the Baltic. It seemed very sad to me. Here was the concrete structure that was designed to protect the soldiers who manned the gun from an attack from the water. It was a reminder of a war that was fought differently than previous wars had been fought. The other structure was a brick and concrete building that had been reduced to a shell. Parts of it had fallen down but in places you could see the marks left by heavy gunfire.