Getting around
This is more a travelling and planing blog so if you are looking for my daily life, you’ll have to look somewhere else :)Archive for 2009 Around the Baltic Sea
Stralsund and Prora
Two days ago I arrived in Stralsund, a former Swedish town. Very nice but also very empty – where are all the people? Could it be that they are waiting for the festival that starts tomorrow? Anyway, Kim and I thought the hotel would be more expensive here, being a western country and so. But no, we found this place:
It was brand new and clean. We even got a whole flat with three beds and a kitchen. All together for two nights 50€
And if you compare it with a holiday flat in Prora it was like heaven.
Daytime we went around Rügen. We saw the longest building Prora, built by the Nazis for the people to have a somewhere to go on their holidays. It really is awful.
The rest of the trip will be added this weekend. Right now I’m in Carlskrona in Sweden, staying at Kim’s brothers place.
Back in Sweden
After almost perfect Internet access I lost the daily connection in Sopot. I’m now on the ferry to Trelleborg using my phone. Therefore I can not upload any pic. I will come back tonight or tomorrow with reports from Stralsund and Rügen.
Gdansk – what a surprice
This is the hotel in Torum were we slept. It does look awful from the outside but it was clean and nice, a former hospital. And it was cheap.
I slept a bit longer this morning and it was worth it. It rained all morning. Kim then went into town to se a museum while I went to a shopping mall to look for a new MP3-player. My old one broke, it was to hot… I didn’t find any cheap one, I will use my phone on the bike instead.
After checking the polish weather services we left Torun around half past one. No rain but grey skies. We had about 180 km to Gdansk. And we were lucky, we came here safe and dry. It was a matter a fact even nic not being to warm and sweaty from the the ride. Today the temp. just went up to 19 degrees.
I didn’t know how Gdansk would be. I knew the town was totally destroyed by USSR and that it should have been reconstructed. This pic is from 1945.
Today it looks like this, a very beautiful polish town with very nice buildings and streets. The only thing that tells you they are not all genuine old is the year printed on the walls. I often saw something like 1955 or so. Some buildings seams though have been restored, they have older years on them.
Down at the harbour the are making fancy living quarters, just like in Stockholm or London. Here I still found ruins from WWII.
In generell, I was very surprices, it is a nice city. Just skip all the ugly suburbs.
I hope for sun tomorrow, we’re going to Sopot and the beach.
Copernicus and more water
Torun is a very nice town in northern Poland. It has very fine buildings and lots of places to have a beer. Also Copernicus was born here.
The Torun people are proud to have a leaning tower. I haven’t been to Pisa so I can’t compare but this is quite cool.
As we walked through the town an other thunder storm hit us. I could only find this umbrella.
It is a sculpture of a left alone dog. Reminds me of the contractor worker in the street outside Berzeli Park in Stockholm.
Instead we went in to a restaurant – quite a fancy one. But the waiter was new. He didn’t know anything about the menu and we had to improvise in order to get anything.
It was very nice but I think that the waiter had a night he will not forget. Anything than can go wrong did! He forgot to let me taste the wine, he forgot Kim’s coffee, I got pieces of glass in my whiskey and I did get something else than I ordered. But we didn’t felt bad treated at all. The waiter was very friendly and the food was nice so we left satisfied.
One strange thing happened at the end. As Kim eventually got his coffee he also got a small glass with a clear fluid. Yeah right we both said, a vodka to compensate all the troubles. But it was plain water, and it was warm. We asked and the waiter said – “to swallow down the coffee”. Strange restaurant that was indeed.
Btw, did I say that 5 cl Jameson costs 30 kr here? 😀
First a sauna then a cold bath
That is how this day felt. Very hot at the beginning, around 33 degrees. Then a heavy thunderstorm which cooled us down. Luckily we missed the heavy rain but we saw plenty of it’s devastating force. All over the road was lots of broken off branches and the local fire department had to close the road to gt rid of all wood. Right now I’m sitting, or laying in my hotel listening to the rain outside, this is how it lookes like: 
We have dicided to try to sleep out the rain 🙂 as we did in Pärnu. Late breakfast and perhaps some shopping. Earlier today we saw Wolf’s Lair. A lot of concrete and iron. Only Göring’s bunker is that intact that you can imagine how it would have been. 
All the important bunkers were built in two parts. One inner bunker with a 1,5 m roof and outside that an other one with a 5 m roof. You can see the inner roof in the middle of this picture. It has a slightly lighter gray tone.
The last of Baltikum – then Poland
Now I’m sitting in the Hotel Restaurant in the Polish town Ketryzyn. It is quite nice and it has free Internet. The room costs only 450 kr so we are happy.
The last thing we did in Lithuania was visiting Trakai. An old castle which has been rebuilt. We didn’t go in to the castle, but really enjoyed the fine landscape. And we bought some Soviet artifacts; two military hats 🙂
I just have to show you our house in Kounas and the very friendly family running the place. He helped Kim with his bike and me cleaning them. He even acted taxi and took us into the town.
Tomorrow we will visit Hitlers Wolfsschanze. It is the place/bunker in which he commanded most of his strategicmoves of the eastern front during WWII. If you have seen the movie Valkyrie about the attempted assassination on Hitler you will know that this is the place were Stauffenberg made his attempt.
Then we will try to miss the rain (it is said to rain heavenly tomorrow in this region) as we drive further in to Poland, eventually arriving to Torun.
Holocaust
Today we started with a cruel experience, we visited the Nazi concentration camp in Kaunas. Oven 50 000 people were killed her, shot as they stood against this wall (today a green fence showing the place).
I really felt the history among myself as I walked in the building, a 19:th century fort, and saw all the reminders of the Nazi horror.
30 000 Judes were killed, mostly Lithuanians but also from the rest of Europe.
900 French people
Many Germans and this inscription says:
In trauer und Scham – und entsetzt über des Schweigen der Mitwissenden – gedenkt die Landeshauptstadt München der 1000 jüdischen Männer und Frauen, die am 20. November 1941 von München nach Kowno deportiert und fünf Tage später an diesem Ort ermordert wurden.
One nice guesture of the Lithuanian people was the “national” collection of money to construct a memorial statue. Every Lithuanian gave on Rubel in order to make this. And this was done during the communist regime of Soviet Union.
Breakfast in Kaunas
Right now I’m having breakfast in our guesthouse. The sun is shining and we have had home made egg cake with also home made jam. One remarkable thing about the Baltic states has been the free Internet. On every place we have stayed they had WiFi for free. That has made it easy to update this page. Today we are leaving for Poland so I don’t know how it will work out.
Here is a bonus pic from Kaunas, the local Brewery:
Off road, Kaunas and buildings
Today we got really lucky, we didn’t end up in any of many thunderstorms. We met some other Swedish bikers and they were soaked. They had to drive through 10 cm of water! As the doves above we ducked the rain perfectly.
Instead Kim found a nice new route through the woods! He saw a sign showing a Holocaust place which we both found worth looking up. At first it was nice gravel, my favourite! But then it became a mud road – very slippery due to all the rain. But we both said – lets go!
Kim hasn’t got the perfect bike for this kind of road so had had to struggle a lot and eventually the bike didn’t want to go the same way as Kim – so they separated. At almost no speed at all he layd down the bike.
Everything went well, Kim’s bike got some mud stacked on it but it was easily removed. So we didn’t have to go to the hospital shown above. The saddest thing of all was that we never found the Holocaust memorial at all 😦
Now we are in Kaunas, the old capital of Lithuania. But both Kim and I are disappointed, it is not as nice as we were told. Sure, there are some nice places, but in generally it is not that much to see. Lots of half demolished buildings, both Soviet style and older and plenty of ugly graffiti. I will now show you some examples.
Michael Jackson memorial in the main street!
As the Swedish banks all wanted their money back, all construction was stopped and turned into nice playgrounds for kids and plenty of free square meters for graffiti.
Why bother putting up fences – now it is easier for the kids when they want to go biking…
The Lithuanian people seems to care about having nice cars, lots of BMW:s and Mercedes. This picture will symbolize this, all house to the left, almost falling a part, a very nice Mercedes on the right.
During WWII, the jews where haunted down in Kaunas, strangely the Synagogue was still standing. Though in very poor condition.
Here is a nice example though, this house is being renovated and they nicely show before and after. The part to the left is the new part. The right part is also renovated but they left out the finishing.
Here is an other nice example of what to do with all the nice old buildings.
btw, did I tell you we still have the nicest of weather 😀
Sun, beach and icecream
Today we have been plain tourists laying on the beach ang eating ice cream. It is getting hotter every day and they talk about thunder storms. Luckily we haven’t seen them yet. We spent the day at the Curonian Split
Instead we went to the very nice town Nida and hired normal bikes. A nice change going by man-power. We went straight to the fantastic beach an and stayed for a couple of hours.
Tomorrow we are off to Kaunas.
Getting around 