  The vacuum Gowdy models provide much studied, non-trivial midi-superspace
examples. Various technical issues within Loop Quantum Gravity can be studied
in these models as well as one can hope to understand singularities and their
resolution in the loop quantization. The first step in this program is to
reformulate the model in real connection variables in a manner that is amenable
to loop quantization. We begin with the unpolarized model and carry out a
consistent reduction to the polarized case. Carrying out complete gauge fixing,
the known solutions are recovered.
