Hope all goes well in Gdansk . Please lt us know what the meetings are like there .

At the AA convention in Blackpool to celebrate 50 yrs of AA in the UK I met a group of people from Poland they had their national flag and brought it all the way with them

yif

brianh

Hi Brian. Hope your'e well.
In essence I wasn't in Gdansk long enough to gain any real impressions. Four days isn't really much time to get any sortt of feel - especially when the majority of time was taken up by work-role. What Id really like to do is go back, on leave time, and do the "touristy" bit.
I was given an address where it was thought (note "thought) that mtgs were held. But - assuming I found the right venue - it was all locked up and empty. I hung around as much as I felt able to but, after a couple of policemen walked past me for the 3rd time, I decided that moving on was the better strategy. So if I get back Im going to have to ensure I have time on my hands to explore properly.
The place still has much of the heavy industry/shipyard aura about it and from which 'Solidarnosk' was born. I half expected to turn a corner and find "Samson & Goliath" looking at me like the Belfast panorama of Haarland & Woolfe!
There's no doubt in my mind that, in 10 years, this part of the City will have seen a major transformation, economically (a kind of step-down version of Docklands) but an exercise of that scale would have to be entirely & not partially re-funded - but, after the last couple of years, few if any UK finance institutions have the confidence of their EU partners to play a part in it. (Anyone playing the markets - remember you heard it here first!!).
Thinking back to pre-1989 when I used to 'flit' across the Brandenburger Tor, there was a lost of the old Eastern bloc still there.
A colleague recommended that I shied off a hotel & go to a particular B&B which was mega-good advice! My culinary highlight was Zurek - a sausage bortsch inside a small, round, hollowed-out loaf and like a kind of edible tureen - Absolutely delicious!
Will be in touch again soon. Trouble is, for every day Im elsewhere, I return to a day & a half of catch-up.
Col.