Hotel Orle, Centrum Hotelowo - Konferencyjne Gdansk

... S. Embassy might be close enough to sign documents.

So out into the sun and down to the pier. The pier here is quite famous. It is 500 meters long and has had a checkered history. It survived two World Wars and also survived misguided intentions to just pull it all down. Now it is being revived again with a marina scheduled to open next to it in a couple of years. For now, locals and tourists ...

I am not a hot chocolate drinker. Maybe one or two Swiss Miss packets in a 2 or 3 year period is about enough for me and then I need enough marshmallows to totally take over the chocolate. So a couple of years ago (already!), traveling in Croatia, one of the other tourists (Thank you Heather!), got a cup of hot chocolate at a roadside restaurant. I was intrigued to see that ...

... Usually you can get a taster, several of their beers in small glasses. The bartender does not see us. I walk to the other end of the bar. Neither one of us is seen. Hubby waves his arms and finally attracts notice and gets his beer.

Hotel bar and café. You can sit and use the internet. There are menus where you can get small snacks or expensive wines and beers ...

... is a piece of green amber. Hubby found an amber elephant which was a bit pricier than he desired but he hardly ever finds anything for a souvenir so it is going home with us.

Wandering and wandering back around the town, through the market to pick up some food for the train trip on Saturday and back to Sopot and the hotel. Tomorrow it will definitely be ocean viewing and pier walking.

... presumably the same person. I think she was giving a progress report because each time she would crane her head to look out the window at the same monotonous cornfields. Not speaking the language I can't exactly confirm it but I think I heard, "Can you hear me now?" several times because she would rearrange the position of the phone while shouting the same question over and over for all to hear. Maybe they can't hear you, but we sure can.

All ...

... to be honest perhaps not breakfast food. In the distance we heard a marching band getting ready for the May 3rd Celebrations, remembering the student uprisings. Walking in the opposite direction to everybody else we headed to the Gdansk Shipyard Gates where the Solidarity Movement started. It was this that was effectively the catalyst for the downfall of communism in Poland and then the fall of the other communist regimes across Eastern Europe. The large monument remembers ...

... there was a lot of the heavy, depressing Russian influence with their huge ugly multi-storied apartment complexes made out of concrete. If they wanted to spread their architecture, why couldn't they have picked their beautiful buildings, like in St. Petersburg? It would be interesting to see Poland in another 10 years or so if they are able to remain free and prosper. We returned to the ship and are off to Ronne, Bornholm,
Denmark.

... played an integral part in Polish history. Here we saw the monument to the fallen shipyard workers, commemorating the employees killed by Soviet forces for striking in the 1970's. This part of the shipyard was a bit of an industrial wasteland now, but just inside the gates we found the outdoor 'Roads to freedom' exhibition, a collection of displays and artefacts illustrating Poland's path to democracy, from the 1956 uprisings to martial law to the Solidarity protests of the 1980's ...

... p*nts *nd the t*nned legs were simply * viewing ple*sure! Anyw*y, this is possibly the filthiest b*r I've been in. So m*ny boyfriends were here with their birds - hmmmm, wonder why?! :o) Our w*itress took * bit of * shine to Mr Thomson when he s*id he w*s Scottish (how she didn't guess I'll never know!). She studied in Aberdeen *nd then put on * Scottish *ccent - r*ndom *s feck! Si then seren*ded her with his m*gic tricks..........BUT ...

... for young children. If you want to find out more : www.odysseyofthemind.com Kinga's father let us taste some good Polish beer from Gdansk (Kaper) and after that we drove to Kinga's place where her flatmate had some vegan food for us (Lentils and spinach salad). We had a great time at Kinga's place and she showed us her pictures of her latest trip to Rumania.