-
Gdansk, Poland
-
This place was Amazing
-
Gdansk was freezing! Amazing what a little bit of wind-chill can do. We shivered as we walked along the cobblestone streets amidst buildings of a different sort of architecture that we've seen so far. The houses reminded us of a movie setting because from front to back, they looked like cardboard cutouts. The buildings were tall and narrow, etched on the surface with different designs and colors. They even appeared as if a giant had taken all the buildings and stretched them towards the sky so they were no longer to proper scale or they looked like the reflection from a fun circus mirror that puts everything out of skew. In a way, we felt like we were characters in Alice in wonderland. The final touches on the buildings were nice, as well. For instance, the storm drains were often statues of creature's heads, and the excess rain water drips out from the mouth of the creature. The new town district was also distinct. They retained the narrow, stretched out shape of the old town buildings, but the surface was more sleek, often decorated with more modern designs or covered with glass.
Gdansk, in many ways, is a very up and coming town. We say this because it is now a place that is in different stages of development. On one hand, you see littered everywhere, broken down, destroyed buildings - left over remnants of the damage from World War II. You also see near the riverfront, stretches of property still underdeveloped or under construction. On the other hand, there were areas in Gdansk's old town that had been beautifully renovated. It will be really interesting to see Gdansk in its full glory when all their construction and repairs are complete. For now, we prefer to remember this city as a place still trying to find itself, and depending on which way you look and turn, captured in different periods of time.
For a small city, Gdansk has a huge history. Gdansk was the first town attacked by the Germans during World War II. It was also the site of the German's last stand in 1945. Gdansk also happened to be the city where the shipyard workers started a strike which eventually helped to do away with Communism not only in Poland, but the rest of the Communist Bloc as well. It's strange to think that the opening of Eastern Europe occurred so recently. We were in high school at the time all of this started to take place; yet being in our own little world in the States, we were completely blind to it. We remember the fall of the iron curtain to be only a passing thought. The significance of this only increased with maturity of age and recently we've come to finally grasp how recently these events took place.
-
-
It's freezing!
Posted
Dec 13, 2005
by Mr.Anderson
Would you like to post a comment?
Sign Up for Free or
Sign In to post a comment