kagablog

Two Polish friends, Paweł and Matylda, will escort me to Gdańsk and I regard myself lucky. You can get by with your Lonely Planet guide and there is an eagerness in cafés and bars to serve the traveller in English, but you’ll miss out on the nuances between say an authentic and an instant żurek soup. If you really want to hear English as spoken by a Pole, you need to talk to the staff of London restaurants or Belfast hotels these days - like the Afrikaners the Polish are experiencing their own diaspora during the last decade.

For its livelihood Gdańsk has always turned to the sea with all its trade routes and its wealth of amber reserves. So when Paweł and Matylda suggested we approach the city from the coast, or as far as we’re able to by beach, that sounds appropiate. The Baltic remains the cold seagreen way to the heart of Gdańsk.

There is a cluster of three Polish cities along the Baltic coast: Gdynia, Sopot and Gdańsk. We’ll be staying in the holiday apartment of Matylda’s wealthy aunt in Gdynia. Such an apartment bloc from the seventies takes getting used to. Outside the plasterwork is a miserable grey, especially in winter, and wherever it’s not crumbling or patched-up graffiti rules - like in all subways, on gas pipelines and on trains – yet inside the open space has all the white goods you can wish for, plus sprung wooden floors and puffed-up duvets with floral covers.

To line our stomachs we breakfast in one of the taverns on the Gdynia foreshore. We pick a backpacker’s hang-out where a kind of omelette is served with a puddle of mushrooms, tomatoes and melted cheese in its centre. As we chew away it becomes edible, but coffee seems essential afterwards. Now we’re ready for the beach trail to Gdańsk, the city named Gyddanyzc by a Benedictine monk as early as the year 999.

It’s almost May the first, workers’ day, and the spring sun shines gaily. The trail starts at a monument honouring one of the greatest writers of the English canon, Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, aka Joseph Conrad. A Wroclaw academic once said to me that Conrad ‘was lost’ by the Poles. They do treat their writers with reverence; in the royal castle of Wawel in Kraków many writers and poets lie tucked in under engraved slabs.

‘There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea’ – with Conrad’s words to ponder on we finally set off to Gdańsk on a pristine beach, keeping as close as possible to the fresh Baltic Sea.

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