Kevin's Photoblog

These are my bags on arrival, being loaded into the car.  The big yellow bag is a veteran of two trips to Poland, there and back, but is now falling apart.

This is more a picture for my Polish friends.  What you see here is the Presque Isle Airport (three flights here on a busy day).  I think the picture shows everything.  I am standing at the exit to the airplane, shown in the second picture.

This is a dinner with some of my Rotary colleagues, some of whom are working on establishing a Planet Head Day in Poland.  There were some other dinners and such during the last week, but I seldom thought to take pictures

The last week was a lot of dinners, this being with some of my neighbors, at a little restaurant along the Oder River.  We are eating hamburgers, as I get tuned up again for American food.

 

What follows are a few final photos from my last week in Szczecin and arrival in northern Maine.  The last week was very busy with me trying to finish projects, get everything leaned and sorted and, it seems, a going away party every evening (from neighbors, colleagues, office, Rotary).  My neighbors took me out and on the way we had to visit the cemetery.  This is, again, the second largest in Europe and something that Szczecin is very proud of.  I include two more pictures here.  The first is of some German graves that have been preserved.  The second picture is a couple of Polish graves from the late 1940s.  What is interesting here is that the flowers and candles are in evidence here as everywhere else.  The Poles take their cemeteries very seriously.

In front of the old geology building are some large boulders of granite and gneiss.  A nice display, and educational.  We should have some of these in front or behind Folsom Hall – Chunzeng, what do you think?

Another street corner with the beautiful old German architecture.  I have said many times that Szczecin should better market their city to tourists.  There is no old rynek square as in Poznań, Torun or Gdansk, but there is still much beauty to be seen.  The second picture shows the same corner building with one of the old water pumps in the foreground; there seem to be one of these pumps every block or so (I would guess they also served as fire hydrants).

This is the edge of what I am told is the second largest cemetery in Europe.  This goes on and on.  This picture was taken during Easter weekend, but even away from the holidays the number of flowers – many of these are fresh flowers – and candles that decorate the graves is amazing, at least by our standards.  Family is very important to Poles, who have an almost Japanese respect for ancestors.  Note that many of the grave sites have benches for visitors.

This is a building not far from where I work.  Those surely are bullet holes.  These are now fairly hard to find, as most of the buildings have been refurbished, but damage from the war was still pretty common until recent years.  This building is near a pretty major intersection and fighting there must have been furious.  The Germans were defending one of their home cities, and not far from Berlin.  There are few older buildings in this immediate area, with a modern shopping mall now on the opposite corner.

 

Beer at a favorite local watering hole, the Cutty Sark Taverna.  Here are colleagues from Poland, France, Turkey and China.  Another restaurant has a Celtic décor with a signature from Sinead O’Connor, who had a famous altercation with Pope John Paul II.  The Poles seem to take everything in stride.