Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Keri's Travel Blog
At this stage of our journey I can feel the ports of call and various sights blurring – as the days merge into one long succession. The second leg of our cruise – which effectively started in Copenhagen – has seven stops in consecutive days: Warnemunde German, Gdynia Poland, Klaipeda Lithuania, Riga Latvia, Tallinn Estonia, St Petersburg Russia, Helsinki Finland and Stockholm Sweden – then back to Copenhagen. It is wonderful to encounter a small taste of each country and to see and feel something of the local culture and history.
And so it was we finally set foot on Polish soil after wanting to visit here for so long. We will be returning to Poland for four days following the end of the cruise to visit Warsaw, Krakow and Auschwitz. But for now we landed in Gdynia a seaport on Poland's Gdansk Bay.
For centuries, Gdynia was fishing village but in the early 1900s a Polish seaport was built here. This was destroyed by the Germans in World War II, and the locals displaced or sent to Nazi concentration camps. After the war the city was gradually regenerated with its shipyard being rebuilt. It is now a major port of call for cruise ships visiting the Baltic Sea.
The old town of Gdynia is quite small and by comparison to Gdansk its more famous neighbouring city, there are relatively few and wondrous sights to see. So Terry and I hiked the 3 km to the local railway station where we bought tickets for the next train to Gdansk. It’s always fun in a foreign country trying to figure where and how to do this, but we managed with the assistance of some friendly locals.
We were impressed with the cheap ticket price– about AUD$3.00 each – and the luxuriousness of the trains. There was on-board high speed Wi-Fi, tables at each seat and so on. The train was like a bullet train in shape. It wasn’t until the return trip we realised we’d jumped been on the intercity luxury train, and not the clapped out suburban rattler we were supposed to be on. No Wi-Fi, stops at every station, no air conditioning, and hard-ass seats.
Gdansk is breathtakingly beautiful. It’s an ancient city – but most of us know it in more recent times as the place where Poland’s Solidarity movement came to prominence in the 1980s, initially amongst striking shipyard workers. The movement led to the overthrow of Communist rule in the Poland – and indeed helped with the eventual fall of communism in the Eastern Bloc countries, many of which we are visiting.
Gdansk dates to the 12th century or thereabouts and everywhere there are huge stunning medieval towers, structures and churches intermingled with smaller old houses and buildings. Quaint little squares dot the town with gardens in bloom.
I meant to say earlier how lucky we are to be visiting the Baltic on the cusp of Spring and Summer. All of the trees are coming out in their beautiful verdant colours, and there are flower beds blooming all through the parks. The weather has been amazing: sunny, clear blue skies – but also quite crisp, which is fine as long as you wrap up well.
Anyway back to Gdansk. The city's history is complex, with periods of Polish, Prussian and German rule, and periods self-rule as a "free city". Gdansk was the site of the first invasion of Poland by the Nazis precipitating of course Great Britain’s and its allies’ entry to the Second World War.
We only had a few hours to wander around so didn’t really have a chance to visit any of the numerous museums in the city. We did however visit St Mary’s Basilica, the world’s largest brick church which can apparently hold up to 25,000 worshippers! Again like other towns we’d been to the streetscapes are awesome. We visited on a Sunday so there plenty of locals out and about, and the outdoor restaurants and cafes were overflowing with people.
I could bang on for ages about the beauty of Gdansk, but will let some of the pictures we took, tell the story. After satisfying ourselves with as much ambience as we could we headed for the train station and after a few false starts managed to find the right train back to Gdynia and the ship. Another simply stunning stop on our Baltic pilgrimage.
See you on the next blog post.
Ciao
Keri
And so it was we finally set foot on Polish soil after wanting to visit here for so long. We will be returning to Poland for four days following the end of the cruise to visit Warsaw, Krakow and Auschwitz. But for now we landed in Gdynia a seaport on Poland's Gdansk Bay.
For centuries, Gdynia was fishing village but in the early 1900s a Polish seaport was built here. This was destroyed by the Germans in World War II, and the locals displaced or sent to Nazi concentration camps. After the war the city was gradually regenerated with its shipyard being rebuilt. It is now a major port of call for cruise ships visiting the Baltic Sea.
The old town of Gdynia is quite small and by comparison to Gdansk its more famous neighbouring city, there are relatively few and wondrous sights to see. So Terry and I hiked the 3 km to the local railway station where we bought tickets for the next train to Gdansk. It’s always fun in a foreign country trying to figure where and how to do this, but we managed with the assistance of some friendly locals.
We were impressed with the cheap ticket price– about AUD$3.00 each – and the luxuriousness of the trains. There was on-board high speed Wi-Fi, tables at each seat and so on. The train was like a bullet train in shape. It wasn’t until the return trip we realised we’d jumped been on the intercity luxury train, and not the clapped out suburban rattler we were supposed to be on. No Wi-Fi, stops at every station, no air conditioning, and hard-ass seats.
Gdansk is breathtakingly beautiful. It’s an ancient city – but most of us know it in more recent times as the place where Poland’s Solidarity movement came to prominence in the 1980s, initially amongst striking shipyard workers. The movement led to the overthrow of Communist rule in the Poland – and indeed helped with the eventual fall of communism in the Eastern Bloc countries, many of which we are visiting.
Gdansk dates to the 12th century or thereabouts and everywhere there are huge stunning medieval towers, structures and churches intermingled with smaller old houses and buildings. Quaint little squares dot the town with gardens in bloom.
I meant to say earlier how lucky we are to be visiting the Baltic on the cusp of Spring and Summer. All of the trees are coming out in their beautiful verdant colours, and there are flower beds blooming all through the parks. The weather has been amazing: sunny, clear blue skies – but also quite crisp, which is fine as long as you wrap up well.
Anyway back to Gdansk. The city's history is complex, with periods of Polish, Prussian and German rule, and periods self-rule as a "free city". Gdansk was the site of the first invasion of Poland by the Nazis precipitating of course Great Britain’s and its allies’ entry to the Second World War.
We only had a few hours to wander around so didn’t really have a chance to visit any of the numerous museums in the city. We did however visit St Mary’s Basilica, the world’s largest brick church which can apparently hold up to 25,000 worshippers! Again like other towns we’d been to the streetscapes are awesome. We visited on a Sunday so there plenty of locals out and about, and the outdoor restaurants and cafes were overflowing with people.
I could bang on for ages about the beauty of Gdansk, but will let some of the pictures we took, tell the story. After satisfying ourselves with as much ambience as we could we headed for the train station and after a few false starts managed to find the right train back to Gdynia and the ship. Another simply stunning stop on our Baltic pilgrimage.
See you on the next blog post.
Ciao
Keri
- comments