A Bit of History

We started off our day at Solidarity Square, in front of the shipyard where striking workers in 1989 were the beginning of the end of communism in all of the Warsaw Pact nations and we stopped into the museum there because it was raining, but our plan was to go to the WWII museum, about a 15 minute walk away.
The Solidarity museum was a very impressive building, huge internal space with a bit of a garden, but we didn’t want to pay the ticket price so just saw the exhibit of photographs on the ground floor and waited for the rain to stop.
The WWII museum was bloody massive. The line to get in was intimidating, and it was crowded inside as well, but not so much that it interfered with the experience. Most of the history, of course, is known, but it was a reminder that Russia, which justifiably gets credit for breaking the Nazi war machine and winning the war for the Allies, started off as allies of the Nazis, and the Poles have not forgiven them for that, especially not in Gdansk.
I’m glad the kids saw it. WWII it totally ancient history for them.
By the time we got out of there and found a restaurant we liked for lunch, it was already 3 p.m. The place we chose (I forget the name, so I guess this is useless as a review) got pretty high marks from all of us for the food, wound up being a lot less expensive than we thought, and super high marks for atmosphere. So many places are just spaces, with a wall and some windows between you and the street, but this place had an entrance hallway so that when you entered the second door into the restaurant, you were in a totally different world. Exposed wood beams, lots of wood carvings, folklorically decorated ceramics on the walls, and against one wall a series of … well, I don’t know what you would call them, they were in frames like paintings but they all had pieces of tree branches, adorned with tufts of green, from what material I don’t know, but it was all very pretty and arboreal. Also, the menu was in 3 languages. Polish, of course, Kashubian, and English. I’d never heard of Kashubian before but it’s apparently the local dialect.
Tomorrow, a day trip to Sopot.