On Monday, I went to Poland. This was a slightly harder journey than the one I’d originally planned and took four trains instead of one.
I started planning this journey in about March, choosing my cities, calculating how many nights to spend in each so that I could get from London on one Friday to Warsaw on the next. At the planning stage, there was a direct train from Berlin to Warsaw. But I couldn’t book it that far ahead and by the time I could, it had become a regional train from Berlin to Frankfurt am Oder, on the border, and then the intercity from Frankfurt to Poznań. Fine. But a week or so before that Monday, a few days before I left home, I got an email telling me my train was cancelled. I could use my ticket on an alternative connection. Click here for alternatives. There are no alternatives.
OK. There are always alternatives. What I established was that the rail network was being dug up in the centre of Berlin, which was why the regional train was cancelled. The intercity was still going, I just had to get to Frankfurt. Digging in the Deutsche Bahn website, I discovered that the regional train was also still running, it was just starting from Erkner, right on the edge of Berlin, rather than from the Hauptbahnhof in the middle. Great. Just have to get to Erkner. Erkner is on the end of the S3 S-Bahn commuter line. All I have to do is find a station the S3 is running from. Because of the station closures in the centre, that station was Friedrichstrasse. And I could get a direct U-Bahn from the station outside my hotel to there! See, there’s always an alternative!
My Polish intercity left Frankfurt at 10:49. The original regional train was going to leave Berlin Hbf at 09:14 but if I was going to fit in so many connections, I’d have to be out much earlier. On the bright side, once I was on the Poznań train, I could relax for the rest of the day. The stressful bit, getting three trains in place of half of one, would all be done by 10am, which left a lot of the day to not be stressed in.
I can’t remember what time I actually left. I took the U-Bahn, found my S-Bahn, followed the crowd who were all clearly doing the same thing, out of the S-Bahn platforms at Erkner to the mainline platforms, where the regional train was waiting. It was a double-decker! I will never not go upstairs, even though the second-class upstairs seats were sideways and the windows were designed to let in light rather than give you any view. I love a train with an upstairs. Spoiler, that was the only double-decker on my entire adventure and I wish there had been more.
The regional train delivered us to Frankfurt am Oder just after 10am, which gave me 45 minutes to find my train, which turned out to be waiting on exactly the platform DB had told me it would be at. Now, I’m deeply suspicious of that kind of thing. Nearly 10 years ago, my long-distance train from Helsinki in the south of Finland to Rovaniemi in the north was sitting at the platform half an hour before it was due to depart and it turned out to be an out-of-service train about to set off for the depot. The result was that I went with it, through the train wash, and had to be removed from the depot and sent by taxi to the next station to catch a train four hours later than I’d intended. So I wasn’t at all convinced that this train was actually the one I wanted. It said it starting from Frankfurt am Oder and going to Warsaw via Poznań but was it really? Well, the more I watched and waited, the more I watched other passengers and the staff, the more convinced I became that this really was the train and it really was just sitting there for an hour before its departure time.
I had a reserved seat so I found my carriage – Polish trains neither number nor name their carriage logically – and my seat. This wasn’t a normal train, two seats each side of the aisle. This was a train with compartments, three in a row and a door you could slide shut to keep out the passengers rushing up and down the aisle. I was in the forward-facing corner, next to the window. I put my big suitcase in the luggage rack, put my personal item under my feet, fished out my charger and plugged my phone in to the glowing green socket under my arm rest and made myself comfortable. My only complaint was that it was a bit dark and I couldn’t find the light switch, and it was a bit warm. I opened the window.
More of a complain when my five fellow travellers boarded over the next twenty minutes – that compartment starts to feel a bit cramped when you get six people and their luggage in that space. But still, once we set off, we were in Poland within five or ten minutes – the border is the river on the outskirts of Frankfurt. There’s a post painted with the German flag colours on one side of the bridge and a post painted in red and white on the other and there we were, in Poland! I’d love to tell you lots about the journey but it was about an hour and a half and mostly just through countryside. I followed along on Google Maps – gone are the days when you could easily get confused and jump off in the wrong place, as I once did in Romania. I watched fields and trees and rivers and villages from the window, looked at the small towns coming up, mentally marked off that my phone was tracking us to the right place and at last, I saw the edges of Poznań coming in.
Poznań main station was confusing. I left the platform and went up some steps or maybe down some steps and found myself in the main concourse. It was lunchtime, it was about 12.30pm, and it was far too early to check into my apartment which was right opposite the station. I didn’t want to carry an over-filled 45l backpack and a handheld personal item into Poznań for the afternoon so I went for the left luggage lockers. Here I had trouble. I had no Polish coins and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to use the card-operated lockers. It wanted me to put the locker number in on the keypad but the locker number had letters in, which the keypad didn’t. It looked like only two or three lockers were even available to use with a card, anyway.
So I went to the reception desk of my apartment. I had instructions telling me to come to reception and where there’s a reception, there may be an opportunity to leave luggage. I crossed the road, crossed the tram tracks by the little footbridges, since that section was closed and having construction work done to it, followed helpful signs that told me this apartment business was a bigger deal than one person renting out their own apartment, and requested to leave my luggage. No, they’d check, but they thought the apartment was ready. It was! In fact, it was so only just ready that by the time I’d figured out how to get into the building and how to find the lift and gone all the way up to the sixteenth floor, the cleaner was still in the apartment – it’s quite a shock to put your key in the lock, turn it three times, hear the thing clunk and then find a stranger in there. But it was fine, it was just the cleaner checking everything off, ushering me in, waving as she left.
Oh, this was an apartment! Why did I only have one night in this wonderful place? My living room had an entire glass wall and I could open the door and walk out onto my balcony, overlooking the beehive-like main station, the quiet side of Poznań and all the way out into the countryside. 11/10 view, would gaze at it again and again and again. But I had less than 24 hours to appreciate Poznań, so I left my luggage, changed my t-shirt for something a bit less sweaty, put my food and drinks in the fridge and went straight out.
I should have thought about how the trams worked, figured out how to buy a ticket and which one would take me nearest the old town but I didn’t want to. I decided to walk. I walked through a park with a duckpond opposite the apartment complex, along a street with tiny supermarkets every couple of hundred metres, down a hill towards some pretty architecture and then past a long building occupying two or three “blocks” and into the old market square, Stary Rynek, which I was to learn in Wrocław just means “old market square” rather than specifically referring to the one in Poznań. I said last week that I’d deliberately carried A Chip Shop in Poznań to this square to take a photo with it in front of the colourful buildings on its cover – I’d already looked up exactly where those buildings were, which wasn’t difficult to figure out, and I just had to get my bearings and find the right corner of this square. Just about every building is colourful and beautiful and tall and thin, ranging from greys to blues to pinks to yellows. Every corner has a big fountain featuring figures from mythology. And the crowning glory is the Renaissance-style town hall, which has three levels of covered galleries, three smaller towers on the front and a huge clock tower rising up and up out of the centre.
I spent a while walking around taking photos and drinking it in and then I realised I needed to drink something for real. The hundreds of mini supermarkets had now vanished but the entire square was lined with cafes and restaurants and they all had tables out the front covered in large umbrellas or gazebos. I spent a while reading menus before stopping at Czerwone Sombrero, the Red Sombrero. Not that ARFID-girl here actually had any Mexican food – I asked for plain chips (“plain? No salt??” “Oh yes please, I love salt”) and a Fanta and that was great. I’d more or less lived off bread and butter or bread and cheese slices so this was my first – and, I think, only – hot meal of the entire trip. I could have done without the wasp that hassled me.
After that, I had a bit of a stroll round by the castle, which was closed – this is apparently a thing on Mondays – and found a fountain that I could walk through, which was very appreciated on such a hot day. Then I walked back to the apartment, stopping at a couple of the mini supermarkets for bread and chocolate and had a couple of lazy hours.
That wasn’t quite it. There was a birdseed machine at the park opposite. So I went to the station and bought a big bottle of juice in an attempt to reduce my złoty notes down to a single 1 złoty coin to put in that machine (“if I buy this with this note, I’ll get this change. Ok, if I buy this, I’ll get this change. This isn’t working. What do I need to buy? How much do I have to spend to get a złoty coin??”). Then, not having thought to bring any kind of container, I held my hand underneath to catch the birdseed, carried it down the hill to the duckpond and gleefully gathered all the bird life around me for a few minutes.
It had been a long day. It had started with a big journey across Berlin – actually, it started with taking all my bottles back to the supermarket and collecting the deposit, which I spent on a little box of plastic cutlery – and finished with walking 8km around Poznań. It was definitely time to go home and have something more substantial to eat while enjoying my view. In fact, all I really wanted to do was sit on the balcony, write my virtual postcard home and enjoy the view. It was my only opportunity to enjoy it because I’d be off again in the morning.
