Of the past 38 hours, I have spent 15 on trains.

Dear Hannah,

We spent Sunday and Monday in Gdansk. The city is far north, on the coast of the Baltic sea. However, it's not a beach city; the coastline is full of shipyards. It is a tourist town because Gdansk is the city where the Solidarity movement, which opposed Communist control in Poland, started.

	We got on a train at about 6am to arrive in Gdansk around lunchtime. Most of the time on the train ride was spent sleeping. We also made it through a game or two of hearts. Once we arrived, we immediately set off in search of our hostel.
	We had made reservations ahead of time, though the hostel lost them. Even so, the place was cheap. The hostel filled at least one floor of an ancient apartment building. It proved impossible to get a picture of it, however, because there was only about 8 feet of room between the hostel and a highway. The selling point of the hostel, actually, was the short walk from the train station. The hostel served breakfast for free, which was nice. It was clean and there was a public internet computer. However, it was absolutely packed. No inch was left unused, as you can see from this broom-closet-turned-bathroom. There was actually not enough room for a person and a toilet to both exist comfortably with the door closed.
	We went out for some lunch. We arrived at the Neptune and had food. It was good, but expensive (as we had worried might be the case in a tourist town). We were about to leave when a downpour started. It was the windfall the umbrella salespeople had been waiting for. The living statues ran down the street, trying to find cover before their makeup washed off. We saw this pair of dachshunds many times over the course of the day.
	Shortly after eating at the Neptune, we found a statue of him. We had to wait a while to get a picture of him without a pigeon on his head (which makes him a lot less impressive). It must be a pretty relevant statue, since if we had bought postcards there they almost all would have had him on them. We proceeded towards the big church (St. Mary's, I think it was). You can see the tower rising up over the houses here.
	We entered the church and we struck by how big and old it is. It was full of columns, of course, and it seemed like each column had some relic attached to it. You can see a few from this angle (the rest of the decorations are just flowers). On the right is a banner celebrating the millennial anniversary of Gdansk.

The organ is very pretty. You can also see their stained glass window which sits between the entryway and the body of the church. The baptismal fountain, part of which is in the foreground, was built in 1557.



Jesus. He is present several times in this church.



This clock is very old. It tells about the time of day, the phase of the moon and some things about astronomy. When it was built, it was the largest of its kind. It is so large that Thomas could not even fit entirely in the picture.

	For a small cost you could climb the tower. This seemed like a good idea at the time. We ascended a great number of stairs in a very narrow spiral staircase. We finally emerged above the domes, though still well inside the church. It looked like the domes had been recreated recently out of concrete.
	We walked past the domes, then continued to more stairs. Looking up it seemed like an Escher painting as they spiraled around the square tower. The stairs were numbered every 10; by the time we arrived at the top we had climbed about 360 of them.
	We finall emerged from the top of the church. We were heavily fenced in, as you can see. Even so, the view was outstanding.

You can get some idea of the view here. And if you squint, you can see the numbers on the metal flags. This church is very old.



It's very tall.



This is taken right inside the main entrance. The trapdoors above are at the same level as the domes. They are as high as the spiral stairs go, which is at best two thirds of the total height we climbed.

We visited the memorial for the shipyard workers killed at the beginning of the solidarity movement. We also saw the associated museum. Very depressing. Rock on, John Paul II.

The memorial had a plaque in several languages.

We had planned to go to Malbork and see the old Teutonic castle. Unfortunately, museums are closed on Mondays (a non-trivial miscalculation on our part). We are sad to have missed seeing it. We got apple pie instead, at pi coffee.

Watch out for robots.