A discourse on Solidarnosc

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Gdansk, 11-07-2001.

Getting in and out of big cities on a bicycle always is a major hassle, not to speak of the effect the hectic admosphere of big cities has on my poor brain after seven days of natural tranquility.

Hoping to protect my alraedy hopelessly chaotic and traumatised Dutch raised brain from further damage I take a small cabin on a camp ground just outside town. My cabin is even furnished with what looks like an antiquated mini refridgerator - the lettering on the side telling me it is Russian manufracture. Whatever, I can drink ice-cold beer again during the evening on the small balcony of my cabin. No more polish Pivo - aka catpiss when drunk lukewarm - which the shopowners keep telling me is best drunk when warm...

Armed with my aquarelics and sketchbook I take a ramshackle and dust covered tram to downtown Gdansk - more Russian scrypt here -, my worried eyes on the badly maintained bicycle path running paralel to the tramlines and my part of the road tomorrow cycling further east.

Looking at what looks like a very ancient Gdansk it is hard to believe that over 90 percent of the city got turned into rumble by the Nazies with the Polish building it all up again using the rumbles for building material and kicking the originally Prussian-German Inhabitants out and resettling the renovated town themselves...or at least that is what the camp ground owner's wife told me last night in the camping bar...

She also told me Gdansk was the birthplace of the eventual collapse of the German Wall because as she saw it, it was Solidarnosc by Lech Walesa who first had the b*lls to stand up to brutal Russian hegemony, "us the Polish people, not those whimps surrounding us", she told me vehemently looking me wild-eyed in my blue shiners apparently searching my face for a challenge to her holy statements.

By the time I left the bar she was so much into her own world switching from Polish to German and banging the table with her small feminie hands to make her point damning Hitler to hell and beyond, diese verdammte Duetsche feiglinge, never noticing I quietly left the place leaving a handfull of tatty Zloty for my beer on the table.

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Photos

Gdansk
harbour with warehouses

Gdansk
old town