Duck cults of Pomerania

Had I not visited the museum of Vor- und Fruhgeschichte in the Charlottenburg yesterday morning, I would still be ignorant of the use of the duck as cult-object in Iron Age Europe, and would not have seen the Ceremonial Object in approximately the shape of a multi-person bicycle, with three front wheels, two sets of handlebars in the shape of bulls' horns, and four seats in the shape of ducks. I have many photos to regale you with on my return.

There is, I fear, a good reason that 'as fun as a wet Saturday in Stettin' has not entered the English idiom; the cathedral is large and has a very strange stained-glass window depicting Lech Walesa building Noah's Ark with the cranes of the Gdansk shipyard, there's a large Castle of the Dukes of Pomerania looking over the city, the interior of which has been converted to an opera-house and a museum of unlabelled small pieces of castle-building equipment, and the City Museum is shut for restoration. Also, through a combination of my lassitude and my ineptitude in reading timetables, I get three hours awake here, ending in about ten minutes as I board the train to Gdansk.

Polish pancakes are of the size and thickness of pizzas, and rather stodgier.

Also, Livejournal is very carefully localised and so is currently giving me all the buttons labelled in Polish, a language harder to follow by analogy to Russian than I'd expected. Thankfully the buttons are all in the same places as they were in English.

(no subject)

There don't seem to be many corridors here in Gdansk, nor in Szczecin was there any sign of a long-disused iron curtain-post.

On the other hand, as a city to get lost in at night knowing only six words of the language, none of them 'lost' or 'map', Gdansk during whichever festival they're holding at the moment can scarcely be beaten.