Images

I am having dinner and drinking beer (pevo) with three Chinese graduate students.  From left to right, not counting mysef, are Shing Lee, Jin Peng and “Kevin” (jes, one of the Chinese students has taken mine as a nickname).

A couple of pictures of the City Building and old castle; I am sure that I will have close-in pictures of this at a later time.

Szczecin was a major shipbuilding center though much of this is now inactive.  The shipbuilding cranes and other equipment are amazing to see – huge!  Szczecin was part of the U-boat building campaign during the war, and was consequently heavily bombed.  What I learned in conversation with someone on the boat is that the U-boat hulls were built in a city in southern German, and then floated down the river to Szczecin, with construction proceeding while being moved along the river.  A lot of the interior outfitting was done in Szczecin.  From here the crews would be trained in the Baltic and then on to the Battle of the North Atlantic.

During the weekend my upstairs neighbors took me on a boat tour up the Oder River.  This is an old concrete barge that has run aground, and is quite the local tourist draw; you can see the reinforced concrete in the second picture.

Collecting chestnuts is a popular Polish tradition.  We of course do not see much in the way of chestnuts any more since the great dying of the a century ago, but here is what they look like, in the original spiny fruit, and once the fruit is opened.  Very pretty things.

This is a picture of a small lake near the Three Eagles monument, with some of the old German buildings on the opposite side.  Also here are ducks – kaczka in Polish.  A male duck is known as a “Kaczor” which is also the nickname of the man who is perhaps the most powerful person in Polish politics, Kaczyński (known as “the twin,” his brother was president but died in a plane accident a few years ago).

Here I am in front of the Three Eagles (not dragons as I originally thought).  With me is my colleague Jakab’s daughter Ola.

I made the trip over to meet the University President (here called a Rector) and saw this building on the way back.  This is a very typical pre-war German building.  Some have been nicely reconditioned and are displayed in bright colors, like this one, others are much in need of TLC (“tender-loving-care” for my Polish readers).  One, just a block from my office, still had during my last visit, many bullets holes from the house-to-house combat that went through here with the Russians in 1945.  (That building has just been reconditioned, so I will have to look elsewhere for a picture of that effect.)

The Geology Department here is moving to a new second building, while retaining the old one, which had a small science museum not a whole lot different from ours.  They have received a big grant for display cases and are moving into much better digs!  They have been setting cases up all week; I cannot wait until the specimens start to move in.  Believe it or not (and you knowing me, know that I believe it), we could do something like this in northern Maine.  Not just geology of course, but something like this.

The first picture here is of chestnuts, collected immediately in front of the geology building.  The are the nuts “roasted on an open fire” of Bing Crosby fame.  Chestnuts were once the most prolific tress in the current United States, much as the Passenger Pigeon was likely the most prolific dinosaur (sorry Jason, bird!) in the US.  It was once said that a squirrel could cross the entire eastern half of the country moving from one chestnut tree to another and never touch the ground. But the chestnut trees had a blight that started some 150 years ago and has virtually wiped them out.  Chestnuts, though a different species, survive in Poland, but they too are under threat, here by a parasite of some kind.  The trees line the roads here and are very majestic – think of oak, but taller.