The flight from Boston to Copenhagen was above cloudy skies almost the whole way. Given the high lattitudes and it being June, it never got dark enough to see any stars.
A long layover allowed enough time to take the train to Helsinborg in Sweden, then the ferry back to Helsingor, Denmark (1) and a train back to the airport. The bracing air on the deck of the ferry was just the thing after a 7+ hour flight across the Atlantic.
The original plan had been to fly from Copenhagen to Gdansk, Poland then onto Burgas, Bulgaria. However, the Gdansk to Burgas flight was postponed by a day, so I spent the night in Gdansk (2). I hopped the train to the central city and discovered I could actually read a few Polish signs (3).
There was a symphony concert tonight at the Chopin/Baltic Hall. The evening opened with a Mozart violin concerto. The violin soloist appeared to be having a marvelous time, smiling and gesturing to the orchestra members. At the conclusion of the concerto, he performed some solo violin works which were not in the program, after talking for a while in Polish and (judging by the audience's reaction), telling a few jokes.
The second piece was a favorite of mine I had not heard live before: Dvorák's Symphony No. 8. Seeing it performed in person made me realize how many solo parts the piece had, which were acknowledged by the conductor singling out individual players during the applause at the end.
There was still sufficient daylight at 9:00 p.m. for a nice stroll through the city beside its rivers and canals. Gdansk seems to be a place where Polish people come for the weekend (4).
(1) Home of Hamlet.
(2) I had planned to spend the last two days of the trip here anyways.
Sign tells the story
(3) I probably knew at some point, but I was reminded that Polish is a Slavic language written in the Latin Alphabet (a), with various diacritical marks added to the letters. I noticed (mainly from context) that many Polish words have clear cognates in Bulgarian, but not in English or the Romance languages (b). For example: national, old, black, white, cheers, and bridge are all the same (or very close) in both languages (c).
(a) The Cyrillic alphabet (e.g., щ, ъ, ж) was created for early Bulgarian, a Slavic tongue.
(b) French, Spanish, Italian, etc. which derived from Latin, the language of Ancient Rome (hence "Romance language"). Some words used in Eastern Europe have clear French cognates, such as the words for Tickets in Polish, Bulgarian, Russian etc.
(c) Which basically exhausts my knowledge of Bulgarian.
(4) The signs include not hearing English on the streets (d) and the hotel rates being much higher on the weekends.
(d) Although I did see someone wearing a Nebraska T-shirt, a first for me.
Breaking through the clouds on the ascent from Boston
The Faroe Island mountains poking through the clouds
Swedish Royal portraits on the ferry
Lighthouse on Swedish side
Combination Castle & lighthouse on the Danish side. The lighthouse has green and red zones to tell if you're in the channel or not
Sort of metro in Gdansk
Pomeranian flags
Baltic/Chopin Concert Hall
Pedestrian drawbridges
Twilight in Gdansk
I smelled the exhaust from the Trabant (Communist-era East German car) before I saw the car.
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