Blogs from Greater Poland, Poland, Europe - page 2

Hello from Poland. Our ship docked in Gdynia Harbor, on the Gulf of Gdansk, just off the Baltic Sea. We arrived at 9:30, so we had a leisurely morning today (especially with an extra hour on the clock last night too). The view from our balcony is of a very scenic port. We had plenty of time today to go to breakfast, return to our cabin to publish the Estonia blog with pictures, and report for our tour at 10:40. According to the ship’s description of this port: Gdansk, previously called Danzig was recognized by many as the starting place of World War II. The city is over a thousand years old with its founding in the year 997. As member of the Hanseatic League, Gdansk was the richest port on the Baltic and became a ... read more

Today was a hard day as we left Vienna and went to concertration camp (auschwitz and birkenau) very moving. Tomorrow we went to Schindlers factory where he helped some jews.... read more

It seemed like it never got dark at all during the night as we both woke a couple of times and thought it was time to get up when it was really only early morning .Gretchen had been bugged by a flickering lamp on a post outside our second story room. Why it had to be on most of the night in the middle of the forest is beyond us. However ,with breakfast done we loaded up and set a course westward towards Poznan and a two night stop in an apartment on the edge of the city. The weather has improved overall as we have headed further west in Poland and as the sun comes out up goes the temperature by 4 or 5 degrees quite quickly .Perhaps it is something to do with the ... read more

Day 1 - 8 Farwell London! Thank you for your time! I must now leave! Andy joined me for the first week of my adventure; we flew into Sopot, Poland, and together we travelled north to part ways in Krakow. During my time in London I had been privy to negative feedback from Lithuanians, Latvians and Hungarians regarding the Polish, though now I realise that most of these Eastern Europeans don’t particularly get along with each other, an age old dispute following past wars and border disagreements. So although I may have been slightly dubious when I first entered the country, these concerns were completely unfounded. Poland is a spectacular country, the people, the food, the culture. The Polish, by far have been one of the most interesting and welcoming people I have ever had the ... read more

Gdansk, Poland --- July 20, 2011 A large number of passengers chose to go to Stuttholf Concentration Camp and then do a quick tour of Gdansk. Over 60,000 people were killed at Stuttholf, an atrocity against humanity. We have more recent examples of this with Stalin’s starvation of the Ukraine, Cambodia. Etc. We felt that we did not need to go to the camp to see to what levels humans can sink to. So we set out for a trip into Gdansk, the home of the Solidarity movement that was responsible for the eventual overthrow of Communism in Poland. For most of its history Gdansk was primarily a German city but after World War 1 was given to Poland so that they could have access to the Baltic. One of the most remarkable things about the ... read more