Where it all started to fall

This image is not distorted, you're looking at a real house, well, actually commercial building in Sopot, Poland... Paul and Emily on the beach at Sopot...Picture of Lech Walesa in the Gdansk shipyard.







Paul, Emily and I traveled from Krakow to Wroclaw to Gdansk and Sopot together, hitting the beaches and clubs and soaking in the sun. We ended up staying in the house of a Polish man in Sopot for 3 nights. We had to communicate in hand gestures and some German, but we all managed to pick up some Polish along the way.

Poland is home to the nicest cities I've seen so far on the trip, and my last days were in Gdansk, which is my favorite city as far as architecture, proximity to the sea, and history is concerned. It is shipping town with beautiful main and side streets. What I really enjoyed the most about Gdansk was learning its importance in the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think that part of my draw to Eastern Europe, apart from the cheap prices, is learning how capitalism and democracy work in post communist countries. This has always been an interest of mine, probably only having come to realization as I've been travelling. I love freedom. I have no experience living somewhere that has been oppressed, but I always love to learn about struggles for freedom. All of the places I've been to have been under communist influence in the past 50 years, so these places are now more than just a chapter in a text book. They are real, and the people who have fought for freedom are still alive.

To cut through the years of history and revolts against Soviet Rule in the Eastern Bloc, we go to 1970 in Gdansk, where a strike at the shipyard resulted in 80 workers being killed by police. In 1976, a man named Lech Walesa, who participated in the 1970 strike, was fired from the shipyard because he wanted a memorial to be built for those killed in the strike. In 1980 workers again went on strike in the shipyards, asking for several demands to be met which could improve conditions. Walesa scaled the wall of the shipyards and became the leader of the strike. After several weeks, negotiations between Walesa and the managers at the shipyard resulted in the first ever concession that the Communist Government made with anyone on strike. Over the next 9 years, similar acts of rebellion were met with resistance by the government, but also with such great support by the general population that Walesa earned the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Soviets were gradually weakened to the point of collapse. To be in the shipyard and the town where people went on strikes with such importance, to think back to the struggle, the fighting, risking their lives in the name of freedom, was all very inspiring. I felt connected to this place. Freedom is a universal ideal, and all of the sentiment that is stirred from reading about the American Revolution can just as well come from stories in Poland or the rest of the Eastern Bloc.