Great hairy greetings, my darlings! It’s your old fuzzy-headed friend, Marko the Werelynx, bringing you another installment in a series of photo diaries replete with pictures of my trip to Poland last Summer.
When last we left off, my traveling companions and I had parted ways. They stood in line to get into the World War II Museum while I wandered further down the canal— in search of a place to do a little sketching and other free entertainments.
Say, is that the diesel powered pirate ship from Gdynia?
To me, it looks more like they’re stripping down a ship rather than building one
A little sketch
Milk Peter (Mleczny Piotr)
is a 17th Century inn, converted to a cafe frequented by the dockyard workers and now the home of WL4 a free gallery and the home of an artist in residency program.
The statues outside might give you some idea of what to expect inside
Good doggie!
An installation piece? A whole room was set up like a snapshot of life before the Polish Revolution
A wall of poetry.
The Pension — 1985, Czeslaw Podlesny
I walked into what seemed to be the office, and yet had a lot of art on display— I felt awkward, retreated and took a photo from the doorway.
Katarzyna Grzadziela’s sharks
Even video, this gallery displayed a wide range of media.
This section in one of the big installation rooms caught my eye. It’s dedicated to Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal.
I never met Bohumil Hrabal, but during my first visit to Prague, back in August of 1989, just three months before the student protests that sparked the Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution started, I was being shown a few of the sights of the city by Petr Matějů, a Czech sociologist who was a friend and colleague of a high school buddy of mine’s parents. Petr took me to U zlatého tygra (At the Golden Tiger), a famous pub known to be popular with the intellectual revolutionary underground. While enjoying a beer with Petr, a short, balding man entered the bar and walked behind him toward the back room. Petr pointed him out and asked me if I knew “Hrabal” and I was sorry to disappoint him. Well, I’m a bit better educated these days.
A better view of the building from the outside.
A few more metal statues -— a whole procession of them coming up out of the water.
I wandered around for awhile, gazing at buildings in the shipyards and wondering if I was about to be accosted by a security guard. I wasn’t.
Outside the Shipyard Management Building an important area where union meetings would take place and the poster mentions that scenes from “Walesa, Man from Hope” were filmed here.
Peeking into this building which supposedly housed an exhibit on the dockworker’s union— found the upper exhibition floors closed off.
Inside the big, official Solidarity Museum.
A sneaky peek inside one of the exhibits— I figured I was running out of time and needed to get back to meet up with my friends. No way I was going to get my entrance fee’s worth out of this place.
The European Solidarity Center
Gate to the Gdansk Shipyards
Thanks for stopping by.
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