sailorette’s diary - a diary writen by a sailorette for her loved ones to read after returning safely home from sea

I’ve just been to Krakow for the christmas markets with my mum. I can best describe it as christmas without the commercialism. Poland is a really lovely country, lovely in its reluctance to embrace advertising and consumerism. Perhaps what shows this best is the presence of fur coats and scarfs. In a country where the temperature drops to -30º, fur is a luxurious commodity. Anti-fur ideas are not necessary. A bit like vegetarianism in Africa. My mum said that before the anti-fur ideas inflitrated New York, streets were lined with wholesales fur stores, and a fur coat would be passed down the family, from parent to child, an heirloom.

The city was not always polish and Krakow itself is filled with marks of the very fluxtuating polish history. It was part of the Austrian empire in the 1600’s, and previous to that was taken over by the Russian Tartars, whose influence remains in the traditional polish peroigies (dumplings) with a cheesy variety called rushka (russia). It is a crime to remove anything from Kracow that is from before the 1940’s. They keep everything preserved. And this is the remarkable thing about the typography in the city. Art-nouvea type sits next to tradition polish wooden signs and french flourishes.

I wasn’t expecting to hear so many french and italian’s in Kracow. There were a few english but the ping pong pong of polish language, like jingle bells, still dominated the city. I do think they have the best sound of any language to mean thankyou - “chinqueee-ay”.

Even though the theme was christmas cheer, I heard many people asking directions to Auschwitz. I’m not to sure about the tourist thing in a place such as this.

Highlights of the trip include:
The homemade vodka shop
St Mary’s church in Rynek Glowny
Mulled wine, sausage and the Pig on a spit at the christmas market
The underground Indigo jazz bar that, unfortunately, didn’t play any jazz
The Staircase in our hotel - the Hotel Rezydent

View the flickr set

“There’s seven of us you see. We’re spread out all over the world. One in Paris. One in Spain… in America some in Ireland and I’m in the UK.”

One of the great things about flying is when you sit next to a passenger who wants to talk, AND, who is interesting to listen to. Someone who you wouldn’t normally meet, who comes from a different viewpoint, who can give you their personal insight into the world and how they see it.

So here I was, on a plane to Dublin, chatting to an older irish woman who’d been living near london for the past 30 years or so. Her outlook on the rest of the world was factual - Paris: “not enough vegetables, too many people”, Poland: “food was unmemorable”, London: “too many people, I’m selfish you see… I don’t want to be looking at other people, I want to be the only one, looking out at the world.”

Dubliners are, in the true irish way, very chatty, likeable characters. On asking the taxi driver “had it rained cos the fields were very brown when we were flying in?”, I got the cheeky, sparkle in the eyes, reply “well thats the soil you see, thats what’s brown.”

From reading the Irish newspaper you’re hit with the strong catholicism of the country. Stories about the pope make the headlines and accounts of priests double checking that the groom to be was a ‘good catholic’ and not ‘orange’ sit besides stories of gunfights and aer lingus shares. The irish also write pc instead of %.

In 1971 almost 1 million irish were living in the UK, while the population of Ireland itself made up 2 million. John Lennon’s father was irish and Jonny Rotten came from irish stock. In 1846, 280,000 irish immigrated to Liverpool to escape the potato famine, 106,000 of whom moved abroad. By 1851, 25% of Liverpool’s population was Irish.

“But now Ireland is developing at such a fast pace. All the young ‘uns used to move abroad you see… Ireland produces some great minds but they all used to go abroad. Now they’re staying at home and the whole nation is changing, mostly in good ways, but also in bad.”

“I heard something crazy about polish couples coming over to work in Ireland and leaving their children with their grandparents in Poland. The Irish government was talking about giving these couples child benefits, for their children back in Poland. Something crazy like that!”

And so there I was, sitting in a hotel bar, drinking a ginger cosmopolitan, as my gut screamed out for a guinness. And so it is, with every move towards the cosmopolitan comes a resistance to preserve traditional ways of life.

“Go to Hel” - not exactly the thing i’d normally write on a postcard to my parents. But there it was. Plucked from a list of phrases milked with mentions of Hel. Note the missing ‘l’ at the end of this word. Not a typo. This missing letter, stands to distinguish the multi-columned monument of Hell - the Enternal Fire of the Damned - to the singular column of Hel - the Quiet Fishing Seaside Resort of the Polish.

A Bit of History
Hel is at the tip of the Hel peninsula, stretching about 35km out into the Baltic Sea. It stretches back towards Gdánsk, a city absorbed in Polish history stemming from its main position as a port to the Baltic.

The peninsula’s skeleton is thus. The railway and road provide the backbone. This is surrounded by a thick layer of forest where many Poles spend a happy hour searching for the seasons’ mushrooms and berries. The forest layer is further surrounded by an epidermus of beautiful white sands. The peninsula was not always this structured, and was once a set of small islands. A polish king decided to protect the peninsula with sea walls, thus creating the towns chalupy and kruznica that are there today.

Gdánsk, meaning town located on Gdania river, was at one point known as the german translation, “Danzig”. At this point Danzing was under the order of the rather funkily named Teutonic Knights. The city remained Danzig until right after the Second World War when it was flattened by the Red Army and returned to Polish possession. Nice!

Our Trip
It takes a while to get to Hel. There isn’t a Highway to Hel, only a single carrige way road that follows the railway line to the tip of the peninsula. We flew into Gdánsk airport but missed out on actually seeing the city itself thanks to bus No. 110 chugging along at 20m/p/h to Wrzeszcz station. From there, a 2 hour train journey took us up past the famer’s fields of Gdynia and, the excellently named, WÅ‚adysÅ‚awowo, and then along the Hel peninsula to Hel.

Arriving at the luminous station we were greated, as the guidebook said, by landowners asking if we wanted rooms. We’d already booked somewhere so declined offers to ‘ein room’ and wandered on up the main road. After thinking my worst thoughts had come true, we finally found our residence for the next 6 nights. After taking in the view - a dilapidated house filled with pigeons and peacocks - we took off in search of nutrition.

“The Fish is Hel is amazing!” Beautiful buttery halibut. Absolutley delicious. Another favourite of mine was Zurek served in a bread bowl, a traditional polish ’sour’ soup with potatoes, whey and sausage. The beer was pretty darn good as well - Okocim replacing Zywiec as one of my favourite beers. Krupnik vodka is still my favourite with its honey colour and way it silks on the tongue… .

The town of Hel has a rather quaint personality that makes someone like me feel like they have gone back in time. Cute little café’s and ice cream places perch along the boardwalk and main road. Local’s sell seashell necklaces and fluffly seal’s. Wooden changing huts line up along the beach and the place is filled with a calm you would attach to 1950’s england.

Nevertheless, Hel’s personality has fluxuated over history. The only church in Hel, has, as nico stated, ironically been turned into a museum. Occupied by Russia, Germany and Poland, the small town has adopted it’s varied owner’s architecture and cuisine. In the late 1800’s it was officially cited as a seaside resort for polish holiday-makers only to change during the Second World War when it was the main polish defense against the german ships. The battle of the Hel peninsula was the longest lasting of all the polish attempts to fight off the germans.

The one thing that has remained constant is the traditional man-powered fishing boat. Fish is at the heart of Hel’s commuity and it can be seen in the religious fresco’s of christ preaching to his disciples in a fishing boat, and read in the weather beaten faces of the local fishermen. Having read the book Cod a while ago, the significance of fish is something that I find very interesting. While in Hel I was reading The Fish Can Sing by the icelandic Halldór Laxness. Slow to begin with, it was the perfect book to read while in the fishing village of Hel. The themes of fish, community, simplicity, culture and nature swam in my mind and with nico’s paragraph’s from “No Logo”, the hooks of privitisation and capitalism hung hungrily in the air.

I would suggest go to Hel soon. Go to Hel before Poland becomes too developed and absorbs too much of west europe’s languidity. Go to Hel and eat fish!

More on Hel from wikipedia
Nico’s story