Solidarity and Old Town

Our field trip to the Solidarity Museum was a great success!

We left our house at about noon. First we went to the train station downtown. Myles, Ben and Natalie are planning on going to a Gdansk soccer (oops, I mean futbol) game on Sunday. Myles had seen a place down at the train station that looked like a place to buy tickets. We start there to get the tickets ahead of time. That turned out to be a little funny since what Myles had seen was a place to BET on the games, not a place to buy tickets. We learned that tickets are bought at the stadium. They will just buy their tickets when they go to the game on Sunday. If there are no tickets they will try again next time.

From there we went to the Solidarity Museum.

Myles does a great job on his blog www.mylesgartland.blogspot.com explaining what we saw today, so I won't elaborate on that part. After the moving Solidarity exhibit we walked around and explored Old Town some more. It is a very charming area with lots of little shops and restaurants. We walked to one of the largest churches in Europe, St. Mary's. The construction of the church was started in 1343 and was completed in 1447. The church was severely damaged when the Red Army invaded Gdansk in March 1945. Reconstruction began in 1946. The church was the site of the 1,000 year anniversary of the City of Gdansk in 1997. They are currently doing some more renovations.

On the way into the church we are stopped by a guy who had watched us take a picture of Trey. He said to Myles, "Hey, I noticed your KU shirt. Are you American?" He is from California traveling around to different parts of the world. It was fun to chat with him for a bit. It is funny because whenever we hear someone speaking English, it is like music to our ears. We just hear so little of it here! But I do find it interesting that when we are in a mall or restaurant, there is American music playing all the time. We hear Taylor Swift, Jordin Sparks, Black Eyed Peas, Mylie Cyrus, Pink, etc.

So back to the church...we decided to climb the steps of the church to go into the tower to see the view of the city from on high. We climbed the small spiral stairs and went up, up, up. We went up over 300 stairs and the top was not in sight. There is scaffolding and wind was blowing in. It was a really creepy experience. At one point we decided that we were not going to go up any higher...it was cold, windy and we simply chickened out, deciding that the "view" was not worth the obstacle course to get there. So we went down, down, down the small spiral stairs for a long time. We certainly did get our aerobic workout so all was not lost.

From there we stopped at a little bistro for dinner and headed home. It was a great field trip day!