Sydney Harbour Bridge and Gdańsk Cranes

I am going to write about my first impressions after coming to Gdańsk. It is always emotionally confusing when I change the countries. I then ask myself a question - where I belong? When I come here I sometimes feel that this is the place I want to be. Why would I keep changing my mind about selling the Gdańsk place? I know that I should sell it and I go through the motions of preparing for it. I am not stopping it, but I am vacillating. I like to come to this apartment, I like its spaciousness and I like finding my things I left here the last year. They are like nice surprise presents.  I like some Polish ways, they are not my ways any more, but they are familiar and for a while they bring the past back.

When I arrived here one week ago and saw the cranes of the historic Gdańsk shipyard I felt warmth coming to my heart. I felt that I am home. When I come to Sydney and see the Harbour Bridge, I have exactly the same feeling. I feel that I have come back home. This is a very schizophrenic feeling. It confuses me.

Walking through the park this morning seeing the cranes so close I realized that there are similarities between the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Gdańsk Cranes. I did not like either of them at first. They seemed heavy and clumsy. In both cases they overpower the landscape. They did not seem to have anything elegant about them. The design? From a technical point of view maybe even brilliant, functional for sure, but beautiful? No! And then they grew on me and became a part of me. And I started to love them. When you love people and things they do not need to be objectively beautiful, if there is such a thing as an objective beauty. It is in the eye of the beholder. Now, I love them both. They do not seem to be clumsy and heavy. To my eye and heart they are powerful and strong. They are solid and reliable in their character. You can depend on them.

Come to think about it, the whole Gdansk is like that. Germanic in its style, of course. What else? The architecture of many objects is solid with some heaviness about it. The house I live in is like that as well. Walking, from the place I live, towards the Old Town of Gdansk, I see the heavy body of St. Mary’s Basilica, towering over the town. I like looking at it when walking towards it. It seems so distant, but in fact it is not all that far. When I come closer to it, it disappears from the skyline. The next time I see it is when I am almost next to it. Then it towers over me making me feel insignificant in comparison to the reason it was build all those ages ago. And it was built to the glory of the creator and the higher power. This is an intention behind building churches. I have written about the St Mary’s already, some time ago. http://acobserves.blogspot.com/2014/05/sightseeing-in-tricity.html

I think that I need to accept the fact that I can not choose between the countries and that my confusion is just a fact of life.