The obligatory foodie picture from Poland.
On the left: FredFredZ's dinner of sausage: kielbasa, white, smoked, and blood. On the right: Village Vet's dinner of Wild Boar pierogis. Both were washed down with a pitcher (2 litres) of Żywiec Beer, 9.5% alcohol. As you might guess, I am posting very drunk, please allow for any mistakes here.
Catching up on the last couple days since we were in Germany below the orange tumbleweeds.
We ran into a couple from Wisconsin: they noted they had to get away from Governor Scott Walker's libertarian paradise and escape to Poland. Though Nebraska is a conservative state, we're not crazy.
The gun shop owner in our town expressed his concern to my wife before we left Nebraska. He said he would be afraid to travel to Poland. I have never heard him say he was afraid of anything before.
I am not sure why he would be afraid of Poland. Perhaps because it is a socialist democracy. Perhaps because we are only thirty miles from the Russian Federation border. He said he thought that Islamic State might target Poland. (I don't think Poland is high on ISIS's radar.)
To assuage his fears, I sent a postcard from Gdańsk to assure him we are alive.
The following will be copies of E-mails I sent to my poor captive audience, describing what we went through (some of it was pretty harrowing). There are pictures to break up the monotony.
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Our group visited with Lord Mayor Richard Arnold of Schwäbisch Gmünd, and the former minister of the European Parliament for the area. I was introduced as a visiting city councilmember from Broadwater. The mayor was somewhat surprised that a town of 128 people has a town government at all, and was interested in what it is our own town government actually does.
Lord Mayor Richard Arnold of Schwäbisch Gmünd, with the orange tie. He has a very strong handshake. My hand is still recovering. His eyes are not red in real life.
I will recommend to my own village board at the next meeting that we start the way the Lord Mayor greeted us: with champagne and cheese. Perhaps lubricating village board meetings things would go smoother. . . .
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We missed our high-speed train to Berlin from Stuttgart by four minutes, thanks to confusion over the train schedule from Schwäbisch Gmünd to Stuttgart. (Och, we’re off the train!) Fortunately, we also had a regional EU Rail pass for both Germany and Poland in addition to our reserved seats. Unfortunately, I spent a fifty-minute train ride standing in First Class from Stuttgart to Mannheim (because there were no seats and we were on the wrong train). I never had to stand in First Class before. At least the apportionments were good; I got to stand in style. Too bad I couldn’t sit down.
We had a grand total of a four-minute layover in Mannheim to get from one train to the other. Fortunately, we had help from the German rail company DB Bahn’s travel aid people to get on the Mannheim and Berlin trains. They routed us on two trains to make up for the one we missed, so we could make the train to Poland.
They directed us on the train from Mannheim to Berlin and said “turn left.” (That took us to the First Class section, right would have gone to Second Class.) I was loaded down with all the baggage we started with in Broadwater, and turn left took us directly into the First Class club car.
There were a bunch of people trying to board, I had so much luggage it looked like I was moving from Nebraska to Poland, so Beth dragged me over into the first table. We spent the entire trip from Mannheim to Berlin “trapped” in the club car. Just a menu and a bunch of Euros, US Dollars, Canadian Dollars, and Polish złoty. The train would happily relieve us of all of them if we wished. We ordered enough soda and such to avoid being kicked out of the club car for the whole trip.
We were supposed to have a grand total of eleven minutes layover for the Gdańsk train. However, the train from Mannheim was delayed, so we had only 90 seconds. The conductor and the cafe chef were able to help Beth off the train and get us across the platform to the train leaving for Poland just as the conductor was blowing the whistle to leave.
Coffee on the train is 10 Polish złoty a cup (about $2.50 for about five ounces, with free refills). You’d think travelling First Class the coffee would be free.
Though we lost our seats on the first train to Berlin (because we missed it), we did get our private cabin on the second one (hence we’re able to toast our friend from Saudi Arabia with his booze he couldn’t take home). It was a Polish train, and though not like the high-speed trains in Germany, it made an acceptable 160km/h (100 miles per hour). We need slow trains like this in the USA.
On a good note (for us), a member of the Triple Nine Society that was returning to Saudi Arabia had a half-bottle of premium Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey (the good stuff) he could not take with him. He gave it to us to share at breakfast in Schwäbisch Gmünd with others in the group, there were no takers. We took it on our train trip. A deep slug for Beth and me after we made the Gdańsk train, and we were able to settle down.
As a humorous aside: when we crossed the border from Germany to Poland, the conductor came and asked for our tickets (again). He didn’t want to see our passports entering Poland – apparently they don’t care if you enter illegally, as long as you bought a ticket.
A First Class train car. At least I got to use it from Berlin to Gdańsk.
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St. Mary's Basilica, across the street from our hotel in Gdańsk.
There are two carillon towers in Poland, and they are both in Gdańsk. One is at St. Mary's and the other is in another church 500 metres away. They play continuously during the day: we are trapped between competing classical compositions played on bells.
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Churches, fountains, and strong potato chips, Gdańsk has it all. We arrived after a long train trip detailed in the last E-mail from the European General Gathering of the Triple Nine Society, where we spent a week in Germany.
FredFredZ went on a walkabout this morning while I slept and recovered from train lag. (Germany and Poland are in the same time zone.) She shot this morning’s photographs of the local area.
We went to breakfast this “morning” (afternoon). Around the corner from the hotel is a bar/restaurant that has traditional live Polish music (Jazz, invented on Piwna Street, not Bourbon St.)
I asked for coffee to start. The waitress was somewhat confused over an order for coffee (as it turns out, the restaurant offers two pages of coffee varieties). She suggested Irish Coffee (not my former band, the coffee with Jameson’s whiskey). I politely declined and opted for espresso instead.
We are staying in the heart of mediæval Gdańsk until Monday – then it’s the long trek home by taxi, airplane to Canada via Denmark, and the road trip back to Broadwater from Regina (after we get our car’s tires changed).
I also found I could use Skype to make video calls (who would have thought that). I called my son in Florida to let him know we are still alive.
Strong are the potato chips in Gdańsk.
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Village Vet standing beside Daniel Fahrenheit's original thermometer in Gdańsk.
If you ever wondered what zero degrees on the Fahrenheit scale of temperature actually means, Wikipedia is helpful here:
Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on three reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point is determined by placing the thermometer in brine: he used a mixture of ice, water, and ammonium chloride, a salt, at a 1:1:1 ratio. This is a frigorific mixture which stabilizes its temperature automatically: that stable temperature was defined as 0 °F (−17.78 °C). The second point, at 32 degrees, was a mixture of ice and water without the ammonium chloride at a 1:1 ratio. The third point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body temperature, then called "blood-heat".
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Unveiled on the 40th anniversary of the Battle of the Polish Post Office (1 September 1979) in Gdańsk. This monument depicts a mortally wounded postal clerk passing a rifle to Nike, the Greek Goddess of victory. The monument was designed by Krystyna and Wincenty Kućma. The German court of Lübeck acknowledged the executions of the Polish Post Office workers and civilians on 5 May 1939 were illegal and constituted murder of innocents.
The Danzig Polish Post Office (the scene of the first battle of WW2 in Europe). The Danzig Free State Polish Post Office, repaired after WW2. To the right of the door is the Post Office, to the left is the museum of the post office and the battle that took place here.
Inside are the photos and names of the postal workers, railroad workers, civilians, and one little girl about age 10 that defended the Post Office on 1 September 1939 from the Nazi invasion of Danzig Free State and Poland. They held out with bolt-action Mauser carbines and hand grenades, against SA and SS formations, the Wehrmacht, armoured cars mounted with machine guns, artillery pieces, the Luftwaffe, and a battleship pounding the post office for the better part of a day.
In the fight to save the Post Office in Broadwater from closure, I invoked the memory of the Polish Post Office, a battle against overwhelming odds. Whilst we did not have to use guns, we were successful in saving our town's post office from closure.
In the discussion about this, our (now retired) postmaster wanted us to send him a post card from the Polish Post Office Museum (which once again functions as a post office); I was happy to oblige him.
The postal and railroad workers were summarily executed and buried in a mass grave on the grounds. When the post office was being rehabilitated, the burial site was found; this is the marker placed by the Polish Government at the site of the mass grave in 1946.
To end on a lighter note:
The Black Pearl, in its home port of Gdańsk. (The city built a replica of the Disney ship as a tourist attraction. It plies the river whilst performers sing the tunes from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies in the original Polish.
If you dare, there are many more pictures at FredFredZ's Flickr account: https://www.flickr.com/...
Click on a picture to see it larger. Information about the picture will be below it.
We are leaving Monday for Canada, if I don't accidentally on purpose lose our passports.
2:22 PM PT: PS: We have only two followers on our Flickr account of our travels, and one of them is me. (Hint)