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.

Wreaking havoc on the little kids

The beautiful, colorful architecture in the town square of Wroclaw, Poland. Emily and Paul in front of a Pope John Paul II statue in the Wieliczka Salt Mine.

I made my way north of Slovakia into Poland, spending a night in the mountain town of Zakopane before heading to Krakow. Poland is the birthplace of my favorite composer, Chopin, so I caught a concert of Chopin piano music on my first night there. It was advertised as being performed by a very talented pianist who has won several awards over the past 9 years in Poland. When the pianist walked out, he looked no older than 20 years old, but that didn't matter, he was amazing, I almost cried at how beautifully he played. You get a wider range of sound and emotions from hearing the music live versus through the CD or MP3 player.

After two days of wandering and sightseeing in the heat, I was hanging out with a brother and sister from England, Emily and Paul. They have a strong nautical/sailing background and both are in the British Military. Emily had mentioned there was a really nice water park in Krakow that she heard about. Since my only alternative was to sleep through the heat, I decided to go with Emily and Paul. The water park was full of little kids and families. It had huge slides, climbing walls in pools, tight ropes, water polo, basketball, and our favorite, a figure 8 current pool. This pool had strong jets all in one direction, so you didn't have to try and you were whisked around the big figure 8. Our game of choice in this pool was much like a "kill the man with the ball" game. Whomever possesed the ball, was attacked, smothered, thrown into walls, thrown into other people, tackled, and held under water by the others until someone else had the ball. We were ruthless. Both Paul and Emily know how to kill people, and I very much enjoy not being killed, so we were appropriately squared off against one another. There were several people in this pool, all of whom were only obstacles in our way of getting the ball. I know that I felt my body climbing over others while we played this game, and people knew to get out of our way, or they became a casualty.

When we got out of the pool, we looked back and saw young kids, some very young with floatation devices and their parents. "Were all of these people just in the pool with us?" I asked..

"I don't know, I wasn't paying attention." Paul said..

We didn't see any blood or crying kids, so we moved on to the tightrope. Only slightly above water and very loose, it had a rope "handrail" on each side. 10 people would be on this tightrope at once, holding on to the rails, swinging them back and forth and bouncing on the tightrope, trying to make other people lose their balance and fall off. This was our kind of place. It might seem that we tried to swing the ropes to knock off little kids. That isn't the case. We tried to knock big kids off too. It just so happens that little kids don't have the reach and strength that helps them hold on when, say, a big kid like me, pushes both railings in opposite directions with his legs and arms so that they can't possibly touch both at once. Call it cruel, I call it balance training. I wish there was one of these water parks in my hometown.

Wieliczka Salt Mine

The 700 year old 100+ meter deep salt mines at Wieliczka are not just for mining salt. Several of the miners used their artistic talents to carve many sculptures among the salt. The most impressive man-made attraction I've seen yet, is the St. Kinga's Chapel. It is all carved from salt: chandeliers, altar, pictures and other relics. Above are the view of the chapel, and a carving of the Last Supper.

Sandal tan

Wearing sandals all day for weeks in the sun.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

It's hard to grasp the sheer magnitude of the million plus Jews and prisoners who were killed by Nazis in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in Poland. When you walk through buildings and see a 1,000 square foot room filled with human hair, and a large room filled floor to ceiling with hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes, it sinks in.