Lunch In Kubicki, Gdansk
My guidebook said Kubicki was a good restaurant.
It was! And I didn’t have to worry about the gluten-free or the prices. My meal cost me just £17.70 for a salad starter, the exquisite fish and a large glass of reasonable wine.
As with Kubicki, most restaurants in Poland seem to have at least one member of staff, who understands the importance of gluten-free food to some people.
As the other restaurant I saw, Goldwasser, has good recommendations on the Internet, I would suspect that anybody with a food allergy; serious or just preference, will not have trouble with food in Gdansk.
Zuraw – The Gdansk Crane
This medieval crane is nothing like anything I’ve seen before. It was used to unload ships on the quayside.
Strangely, I couldn’t find a Wikipedia article in English. But Lonely Planet has a good article here.
Along The Gdansk Waterfront
I then walked up the waterfront.
It is a plesant walk and there are a lot of places to spend time.
Around The Centre Of Gdansk
I took these pictures as I walked around the centre of Gdansk.
As the streets are not big enough for tourist buses, Gdansk uses golf buggies. As it is such an obvious idea, why haven’t I seen it done before.
The centre has a sScandinavian feel about it. But then it was one of the cities in the Hanseatic League.
The Gdansk Trams
I used the Gdansk trams to get about the city, buying a daily ticket for a few zlotis. The daily ticket incidentally cost me just £2.36 according to my credit card statement.
I did play a bit of musical trams, where yoiu get on one and then get off at a promising site, before repeating the process to get srpound the city.
The Kindertransport Sculpture At Gdansk Station
I hadn’t expected to find this in Gdansk, but when I saw this, I knew exactly what it commemorated, as I pass the other statues at Liverpool Street station regularly.
There’s more about the Kindertransport sculptures here.
For some reason, I didn’t take a lot of pictures. You can never take too many!
Writing this blog with hindsight, my route home from Gdansk could have followed the route of the Kindertrannsport, which is marked by the moving statues. The two I missed are in Berlin and at the Hook of Holland. I actually went very near the one in Berlin, but I didn’t know it was there.
Into Gdansk From Sodot
These pictures describe the journey into Gdansk from Sodot. There is a lot of information about this railway on the Wikipedia entry for Gdansk main station.
The fare was about a pound or so and the machines were easy to use and worked in English too!
After getting in, I searched out the Tourist Office in the underpass and got good information on how to use the trams that stop outside the station.
My Hotel In Gdansk
It wasn’t actually Gdansk, but the next town called Sodot.
I arrived at the Haffner Hotel in a taxi from the airport for a reasonable fare, just before midnight and the girl on the desk looked after me well.
The hotel looked after me well, with good gluten-free breakfasts, including bread.
But it did have one problem. It was outside of the city centre and it was half-an-hour to get there on the train.
But that wasn’t there fault! It was mine!
Liverpool to Gdansk
I’ve flown out of a lot of the UK’s bigger airports in my own aircraft like Stansted, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Cardiff, Bristol and Liverpool, several times. But compared to say Edinburgh, where I flew many times, my single visit to Liverpool doesn’t rate high up the number scale.
But it was a memorable trip for one big reason; the weather.
I’d been to collect my eldest son and fly him back to Suffolk. The terminal was then small and you can just see it in this picture I took as my flight left for Gdansk.
The Leaving Of Liverpool
Then it was a small red and grey steel prefabrication. Now the terminal is many times bigger.
The weather on this trip was good, as the picture shows.
But on that day, we had to wait two or three hours to get a gap in the weather so we could take off.
When we did leave, we had tremendous thunder and lightning and it was a fight to keep the plane straight and level.
But we eventually made it back to Ipswich Airport, which now has been lost to developers and their concrete. Mainly because Ipswich’s geriatric Labour council at the time seemed to believe that private flying was all about rich mens’ toys. Despite the fact that the airport housed one of the biggest parachute training schools in the south of England.
I sometimes think that my life would be very different if Ipswich Airport hadn’t been closed.
The flight to Gdansk from Liverpool was uneventful, even if the Wizzair A320 was rather hot. But I made it off the plane with no problem.
Burnley To Liverpool Airport On A Sunday
To get to Liverpool Airport from Burnley on a Sunday wasn’t easy.
I first got a train to Preston where I got a train to Ormskirk. There was this unusual end-to-end interchange between one of Northern Rail’s Class 153 scrapyard specials and one of Merseyrail’s smart Class 508s.
Changing Trains At Ormskirk
Merseyrail has been pushing to electrify all the way from Liverpool to Preston, which would remove this change of train. Wikipedia says this.
Electrification from Ormskirk to Preston has been considered in conjunction with the Burscough Curves reopening. It would re-establish the most direct Liverpool-Preston route and is one of Merseytravel’s long-term aspirations.
This whole corner of Lancashire seems either to be sprouting wires or growing third rails. Many of which lead to Liverpool or Manchester.
Once in Liverpool, I alighted at Moorfields station and walked a hundred yards or so to Carluccio’s, where I had a supper to prepare me for the journey.
I did search for a bus to Liverpool Airport, but even at the main bus station, there was no information or anybody to ask.
When will these people learn, that one of the way to get people to use buses is to provide information everywhere as London does.
So I reluctantly took a taxi!
The Anonymous Widower 