Friday, August 12, 2005

Sopot IV

We drove into Central Poland, a land of less beauty, of more war time destruction and awful-communist era rebuilding (I swear to God if they COULD make anything ugly they did)....gray apartment blocks, concrete factories often abandoned...even the storks' nests began to disappear.

The village and towns are largely forgettable until a great Teutonic castle on a hill, a real travel poster candidate at a place unlovingly named Golub-Dobrzyun....and then entry into what ought to be an ultra-major European tourist goal for the GRAND TOUR, the great small university city of TORUN, the birthplace of Copernicus, a mostly brick Hanseatic era town on the Vistula. Its old town section, egg shaped and I would say roughly a mile and a half in length and half that in width, is utterly pure...yet not SO perfect in a gruesome Nantucket- Williamsburg way as to be itsy poo and cloying. There are some ugly buildings here and there (only a few) and the shops actually sell things like brassieres and hockey sticks and grapefruit....not just amber to the horizon. The town IS famous for the gingerbread (some recipes go back to the 14th century) and certain streets smell wonderfully of it baking.

The absolute gem is St Mary's, not the cathedral...St Mary's has no tower (the Dominicans were aghast as such ostentation the local legend says)....but the stained glass absolutely rivals Notre Dame or Strasbourg and is worth a trip to Europe....the altar is a great sunburst (Copernicus again?....a glowing orb in a somber building...thrilling, utterly thrilling..

Torun actually was THE center for all of Central Europe in glass staining and this craft is still practiced today in many local workshops...although most of them make things like parrot or smile-symbol plaques to hang in a window. Ugh. Torun is a magical place to prowl....there are three lovely hotels

Adam and I ate gingerbread (he ordered 16 different kinds of cookies which we split and ate in a diabetic orgy)...we poke into courtyards, into a couple of student bars (including one replete with ghastly momentos from the DDR including a TRABANT auto)....Adam does NOT drink alcohol (he says his Polish friends think he is a freak)....but is hardly a born again prohibitionist.

Torun has all manner of cheerful curiosities: a leaning tower, little bronze statues here and there of Polish folklore creatures (sort of like the papier mache pigs which were put for a merry short time around central Little Rock...and which were, of course, vandalized)....I did not want to leave yesterday to drive north to the THREE CITIES.....Gdynia (the Polish port creation...now the richest burg in the land), Gdansk and inbetween Sopot with its Germanic villas and this heap of a late Jugendstil hotel....

the Grand Hotel here is a gas...the beach is wonderful. The dining room has fairly repellent but important looking food, the breakfast is the worst I have had in Poland but immensely abundant...it is a place which has not QUITE awakened from the recent Communist past although everyone could not be nicer. My room would no doubt please Eva Braun....the hotel DID please Hitler.

Fred