Signs of Gdansk

Time is whizzing by now! We are hustling around trying to get all our fun in before we leave in two weeks! Our landlord is bringing over prospective tenants to look at our rental house tomorrow. This actually has helped motivate us to get things packed up and ready to go. We have donated all of our winter clothes. Now some really good news for us (though very bad news for Europe overall) is that the Polish currency, the złoty, is very weak right now. The US Dollar is the strongest it has been in Europe in years. Bad for Europe, good for the Gartlands! We are having a little fun with how inexpensive everything is right now. We are going shopping for summer clothes this week. Thanks Greece!

We have been spending time at the beach. It has been getting into the 70s for the past few days, but a jacket is still a must after dinnertime.

Some kids collect seashells on the beach. My seven year old collects bottle caps! And there seems to be an infinite number of them on the beaches of Gdansk.

We have been making an effort to get as many signs in our pictures as we can. In a very short amount of time this will all be a memory. That's hard to believe.

This sign has always made me laugh.

There are signs just like it all over the place. If you follow the sign, hop on a big boat,

and cross the Baltic Sea, you will end up in Stockholm, Sweden. But I guess you're out of luck if you want to go to Helsinki! There is a big red X over Helsinki on all the signs. Hmmm. Here we are on the banks of the Vistula River.

We went to the place where the first shots of World War II were fired. A German soldier with a machine gun climbed up into this lighthouse and began shooting.

There was a German ship here where the Vistula River empties into the Baltic Sea.

At the same time the guy in the lighthouse was starting to shoot, they also began firing on Polish troops across the river into Westerplatte. This is where a big 70th anniversary ceremony was held this past September. Many world leaders were here along with some dude representing the US who I had never heard of.

There is now a big memorial to those Polish soldiers who died in that first battle.

We are going to be very busy for the next two weeks--but we plan to still take in as much as we can while we are here. We are so looking forward to being home! We've been gone a long time!