I Am A Polar Bear

I didn’t at all want to leave my nice light cool apartment with the incredible view but I’d only allocated one night in Poznań. On the other hand, my train to Wrocław, my next destination, was at 15:44 so I’d actually get a little over 24 hours in Poznań. Did I want to spend the entire day carrying my luggage around, though? No, I didn’t. And because these are serviced apartments with a reception desk, I was able to leave it all there! So off I went, on my now-familiar route to the Old Town, although I stopped in a park because I was hot and tired – I’m now old enough that being on the go five days in a row means sometimes I want to sit on a park bench for twenty minutes.

Sun cream applied, having not done it first thing, I continued and made my way to the square via the long route to see some churches and sit in another park, shaking my head over the little group of goths who had taken refuge from the hot sun under the shade. I was dying in just a green-grey t-shirt and denim shorts. I would have died at the door of my apartment in black PVC and knee boots. Eventually, I found myself in a square called Plac Kolegiacki, where there was a little fountain that I could discreetly dip my feet in. On the other side of the square were two bronze goats and on the lane up to the old market square, I found an interesting church, the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Mary Magdalene and St. Stanislaus, which is a big pink and white church with a green copper roof and a very elaborate interior. The walls and ceilings are all frescoed to within an inch of their lives and it has massive dark pink marbled pillars. It’s pretty but it’s not really to my taste. I like more light and slim soaring Gothic pillars. However, I did enjoy the customary coolness – if you’re too hot, a church is almost always a good place to cool down.

A few more steps up the road and I was in the old market square again. I popped into the tourist information first. One thing I’d vowed to do on this trip was buy a badge for my blanket in every city. That’s an easy enough thing to accomplish and shouldn’t have me trekking round the tat shops for hours instead of enjoying the new places, right? Well, Poland is really into magnets. If I wanted a magnet from every city, I’d be spoiled for choice but a cloth badge was another matter and I’d been in every single tourist shop, searched the station, been into a shopping centre, all in my quest for this badge. The only thing I’d found that was even vaguely what I was looking for was… a magnet. It was a magnet stuck on the back of something that I’d call a blanket badge if not for the fact that it has a huge thick raised ridge around the outside. It was a last resort but after searching all the previous afternoon and evening, I had to accept that the last resort was the only resort. On the back of the packet, it said that you could put it on your t-shirt and so I hoped I could just rip the magnet off the back. Yes, you could. Well, I didn’t love the thick ridge but at least I had my badge. Shopping, tick. Done.

Gradually, it dawned on me that it was nearly 11am and that the famous goats would be butting heads on the clock tower in an hour. There was no point in going anywhere but maybe I’d amble round to that side of the square. As I went, I was reflecting on how non-touristy Poznań seemed to be. You just didn’t seem to get crowds here, despite it being the last days of July, tourist high season. Was Poznań just an undiscovered gem? For a gem it was. Slight spoiler: I came home with the intention of returning to Wrocław and “doing it properly”, with a bit more time, but I also came home having decided my favourite of the four Polish cities I’d discovered was Poznań. But as I walked across the square, I found the tourists. They were packed onto the pavement and around the tables of a particular cafe, all facing the gingerbread glory of the clock tower, phones and cameras pointed at the tower in anticipation of the goats.

It was too early and too hot to join them but I realised turning up at two minutes to twelve wasn’t going to work and I’d need to find myself a spot earlier than planned. So I went into the souvenir shop behind them and bought some postcards to go in my scrapbook and then took a spot. Goats are important in Poznań. The story goes that when the new clock was rebuilt after the great fire of 1536, there was to be a big celebration and feast for the opening of the new clock, and the cook baking the haunch of venison left the meat to its own devices while he ran out to admire the new clock. The meat fell into the fire and burned, so the chef ran off to kidnap some goats instead, presumably planning to cook them in record time. Somehow they escaped and started butting heads in front of the entire town and so in commemoration of the event, the clock now has a mechanism that makes two wooden goats appear at noon and butt heads. That’s why there are goats all over the city, hence the goat statue in the fountain square and the goats dominating the pretty buildings on my magnet-badge.

At 12 on the dot… I was expecting the goats but instead, the clock something slowly struck 12, a bugler appeared on the roof and began to play something mournful – or maybe I’m just accustomed to only ever hearing a solo bugler play the Last Post. It was immediately clear that this isn’t merely an interesting clock but an entire ritual. When the music was over, the two tiny wooden goats, which had come out at 12 while the clock struck, began to butt heads. It was surprisingly slow and non-aggressive and you could see tourists, who’d already been standing there an hour, getting bored and starting to wander off long before they’d reached the twelfth butt. Then the bugler started up again, the goats retreated into the tower and a good five minutes after the first strike, the ritual was complete.

Having only really seen the square, a bit of the back streets and the route to my apartment, I decided to depart the square by its nearest corner and wander down some quieter streets, which led me across the river to Cathedral Island. Obviously, the most important building here is Poznań’s cathedral but it’s also home to the Church of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, which is a spectacular brick Gothic church that looks like someone took a hot knife and cut the western half clean off, the Archbishop’s Palace, the Psalmodists’ House, the Lubranski Academy and various seminary buildings. Only the cathedral was open – I would very much have liked to walk around Mary’s Church but at least the cathedral was open.

It’s Gothic but not any Gothic I’ve ever seen. For one thing, it’s brick. The original cathedral on this site was built in the 10th century, followed by a Gothic version started in the 14th century, Baroque in the 17th, Neo-Classical in the 18th and finally, following major damage in 1945 – and it’s a bit of a miracle it took that long – it was rebuilt for the final time back in Gothic, so although people will tell you it’s one of the oldest churches in Poland, the physical building is younger than my dad. You can just about argue that everything since the original cathedral is just a series of “renovations” but that’s when you put in a new kitchen and repaint the walls, not when you rebuild an entire cathedral.

Anyway. The interior has those Gothic pillars I was missing earlier, only they’re red brick rather than white stone. It has a proper Gothic ceiling, in white with delicate decoration around the ribs. There’s a gold altarpiece in the east end, a chapel and some good stained glass windows. I love Polish stained glass. I began to suspect it here, had it confirmed in Wrocław and got my mind blown in Warsaw. But the highlight of Poznań Cathedral isn’t in the nave or the ceiling, it’s in the Golden Chapel hidden round the back.

Cathedrals often have a chapel right in the “nose” of the east end, behind the altar and it’s usually dedicated to Mary and called something like the Lady Chapel. This one isn’t quite where the Lady Chapel should be, it’s off to the side but it’s a bit hidden from view if you’re in the nave. Its full name is the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament and it’s the burial place of the first two kings of Poland. It gets its informal name because the walls and ceiling are gold. There are niches set into the wall with thrones and caskets and paintings, round-arched stained glass windows above them and then a perfect golden dome above them, decorated with paintings of saints in a circle around the bottom. It’s a spectacular enough place. You can’t go in there but you can put your camera through the bars of the gate that closes it off.

It’s when you notice the machine on the wall next to the gates that it comes to life. If you drop a 5zł coin in there, the lights come on and what you’d previously thought was gold fades to brown as the gold becomes gold. The whole place glows. If you come along while the light is already on, you can’t comprehend the transformation. Who wants to look at a mere brick Gothic nave when the Golden Chapel is glowing like this? It reminds me of my ambition to one day have a golden room in my own house. Of course, that’ll merely look ridiculous whereas this looks… well, you’re no more likely to get to heaven because you’re buried in a golden room (in fact, there’s that quote from the Bible – “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”) but if you’re trying to show that your cathedral is the best and the most holy of all cathedrals, having an actual golden chapel is quite a statement. It clearly works, though, because here I am raving about it and recommending that you pop into the cathedral if you’re ever in Poznań. Yes, do. Maybe take the tram from the main station rather than walk.

That was my next issue. I had to walk back to the apartment to get my luggage and it’s a little over 3km if you take the short route that avoids the old market square. My route did not, because I don’t know Poznań well enough to skirt round it. I stopped in the McDonalds between the square and the apartment on the way back because I was hungry, and more importantly, very thirsty, and it seemed the easiest option. I had a small portion of chips and a cookie because I didn’t know McDonalds does chocolate chip cookies and when I’d finished my Sprite or 7Up or whatever the clear fizzy liquid was – it now occurs to me that it might have been sugar free, given the consequences, which I’ll spare you – I walked back. I was far too early for the train so I sat in the park opposite the apartments and just… sat. Sat in the shade, in the greenery, my mind full of squares and cathedrals and trains, my feet tired and sore from doing a lot of walking. Then we had a bit of an interlude which I won’t describe but suffice it to say that the toilets in the station have air conditioning and are a wonderful place to sit if you’ve got too hot walking 8km around Poznań in one morning.

Getting out of Poznań was a bit of a problem. My train left from a platform that’s not in the station. You go down the escalator – yet another escalator on my adventure that was out of action, and I was stuck behind two idiots who couldn’t lift their giant suitcases high enough to lump them down the steps. Might have been easier to use the grab handles on the top of the suitcase rather than the extended tow handle, saving them a foot or two of lift and enabling them to get down the twelve steps in less than half an hour. This took us outside into the car park rather than to the downstairs platforms I’d been expecting. There were a few platforms on the opposite side of the car park and it immediately became obvious that mine was one of the furthest ones. I couldn’t see any way of getting across to it, short of walking over the tracks – which you don’t do – so I walked back up the concrete stairs to the main road, along the road, down the next stairs down to the next platform and found that wasn’t the right one either. I was already hot, the girls had made me annoyed and now I couldn’t find the platform. Did I have to walk straight into an invisible barrier to get to the right platform? How do I get my train??

Oh yeah, same as anywhere else. There’s a tunnel going across underneath with stairs up to each platform. I could have been in the right place a good five minutes ago, a lot less hot and tired and annoyed if I’d just had a proper look for the thing I should have expected to see.

After taking a train with compartments to Poznań, I was expecting the train from Poznań to be more of the same. I vaguely remember the train from Sopot to Gdansk having compartments. That’s what Polish trains are like. Nope. This one had the usual two plus two with an aisle in between. I had the window seat but I was wedged in next to a large man who played very loud music all the way. I got the impression he was a “chronically online” gamer type but a month and a half later, I have no idea why. Was he playing Switch? Was he playing something? Was he wearing a t-shirt with a logo or slogan on it? There must have been something.

Anyway, the train had air conditioning, I had a window, I got to hear Back in Black played through someone else’s headphones and I reached Wrocław at about quarter past six. That sounds like the evening but it was still blazing sunshine and felt like noon, despite the long day I’d already had. I took a selfie outside the station because it’s banana yellow and crenelated, like a big golden castle rather than a station, then I headed for my tram. Just walking to the apartment wasn’t really an option because while I’d made an effort to keep my accommodation near the stations, I’d had some kind of nightmare here that meant I was on the other side of town. Maybe I misunderstood the size of Wrocław when I booked it. I needed a tram. I needed a ticket. The ticket was fine. There was a ticket machine on the platform, it spoke English and it gave me a 48 hour public transport ticket – there hadn’t been a ticket machine at the stop outside the apartment in Poznań, otherwise I might not have walked 8km in the morning. There had been a ticket machine at the stop between the apartment and the main station but it was inside the area fenced off for construction, so I could see it but not get at it. No problems in Wrocław, except one I was to encounter a few times over the next two days. Wrocław has a pretty good bus and tram network. If I missed the bus or tram, there would be another along in less than ten minutes but it would be a different route and would depart from a different stop. In Berlin, different trams frequently used the same stop before whizzing off in different directions. Not in Wrocław. If you want a different route, it’s going to depart from a different stop.

And, of course, buses and trams don’t stick to a strict schedule in the way trains try to! They’re entirely subject to the whims of traffic and where passengers want to get on and off. Google Maps might say this tram is going from this stop in one minute but the tram doesn’t care what Google Maps says! Anyway, eventually I found a tram going the right way from a stop I was actually standing at. I boarded and conscientiously validated my ticket. Tourists get caught out with this all the time – I’ve done it loads of times because it’s not a thing in the UK. You think because you’ve got a ticket, you’re ok, but the ticket isn’t valid until it’s been stamped. I located the machine and stuck in my ticket. Nothing. I tried again. I turned it round in case it needed to be the other end. Nope. Please don’t let anyone come and inspect my ticket, it’s not valid and it’s not my fault and I don’t know what to do and ok, this is my stop, run before an inspector comes along!

I was staying in a private apartment near the old town, which I’m coming to realise usually means isn’t particularly close to public transport. They don’t run tram tracks and overhead wires through historic squares or narrow cobbled streets. It was a ten or fifteen minute walk on aforementioned very uneven cobbled streets to the restaurant named on my instructions, or the scavenger hunt to find the door. I had six or eight clues, six photos and I had to put them together. Go to this restaurant, the gateway is in front of it (opposite it – they’re not quite the same). Here’s a picture of the door, walk around the courtyard until you find it. Use the keypad on the left hand side. The apartment is on the 3rd floor, keep left. Oh, it’s not as easy as that! Inside, the building looks like a shell. It’s dark, there’s junk in every corner, there are staircases and corridors going off in all directions. Is “3rd floor” the third or the second? What does Poland call the one you come in on – is that the ground floor or the first floor? I had a picture of the door and the lockbox so I could at least hunt for that but what I was seeing on both potential floors was not what I was seeing in the pictures. It took a long time to discover that “keep left” actually means “there’s a hole in the side of the building where you walk through into the building next door which doesn’t have its own outside door” and instead of going up the main staircase, you go up a staircase perpendicular to the main staircase inside this second house, round a corner, down a couple of steps and find the door off at the end. I meant to write a reasonably nice review  on Google Maps which included my own more accurate instructions to get here but I still haven’t done it.

It’s a tiny studio apartment. I filmed it but it seems I didn’t take any photos of it. There’s a tiny kitchen with an even tinier dishwasher but no oven, a double bed with a bunk bed above it, a table next to a window overlooking the courtyard and then a tiny bathroom awkwardly angled into a triangular point behind the toilet. The toilet itself stands on a little plinth and the sink is one of these tiny ones set above the cistern. Coupled with the plinth, I couldn’t really reach it and somehow didn’t notice it at first, so it was easier just to wash my hands out in the kitchen.

I intended to run down to the nearest Żabka for some food and stay in, since it must have been at least 7pm by now and I had a whole day and a half in Wrocław. Żabka, I’d discovered in Poznań, is a chain of tiny convenience stores and if you have to walk 400m without passing one, you’ve probably crossed the border and left Poland without realising. They have fridges full of cold drinks, basic food supplies like cold butter and cheese and fruit and veg and most importantly, they have an entire cabinet full of freshly baked bread at all hours of the day. There had been one downstairs in Poznań, barely 100m from the apartment door so I’d had fresh bread and butter for breakfast. My nearest here was on the corner of the block, probably not more than 70m from me as the crow flies but a little further by the time you’d navigated the labyrinth of the apartment building and crossed the courtyard. However, the one 200m down the road was slightly bigger and a lot better.

Lured by bread and cold drinks and another Gothic church just down the road, I went out. It was still warm, still light but the light was starting to fade. I found my church, St Elizabeth’s Church. It seemed to still be open, although I’d have expected it to be closed by now. To be fair, I slipped in through what I now think might have been the back door. Now, here was stained glass. Again, I took very little interest in the church – Gothic, brick pillars, walls and ceiling painted white – but the windows! Oh, the windows! These were very modern windows, in a variety of styles but a few of them featuring fire and they were incredible. On the other hand, we have to accept that the amazing modern windows exist because the older ones were destroyed, as was an unimaginable amount of Poland, during the wars of the last century. It makes me almost feel uncomfortable to love these windows as much as I do knowing the circumstances that caused them to have to be made, the flattening of so many Polish cities. In Germany, you can just about go “Well, it was their own fault” – not the Germans of today, but the Nazis of yesteryear – but I don’t think Poland asked for aggression. Anyway, amazing windows. I’d enjoyed the windows in Poznań in the morning but these were another level. These were the start of “can I make something like this?”.

Leaving the church, I stumbled into the old market square, learning in the process that Stary Rynek means “old market square” and isn’t just the name of the one in Poznań. And this one was good. It had all the beauty of the one in Poznań but it was much bigger, nearly 200m to a side whereas the one in Poznań is only about 130m to a side. The effect is of the square being two or three times the size. It had the same tall thin colourful buildings, only more of them – give or take the ugly Brutalist Santander building in one corner – and among the pavement cafes and restaurants were a few multinational chains with pretty pavement seating, plus various shops. It was all crowned by the golden light of the sun getting low. It never fully bathed the square because when it reached a certain level, the wall of buildings on the other side cut them off, leaving golden roofs and darkened frontages. The town hall here is a massive Gothic thing, nothing like the gingerbread confection in Poznań. I’d meant to leave this square for the morning, to save the city’s jewel to take in with as much time as I needed on a day when I’d had some sleep but here I was. One more thing struck me. As well as being much bigger, this square was much busier. This is where the tourists are. They’re not in Poznań, except at noon. They’re all in Wrocław. I took a couple of selfies with some of the pretty buildings and then walked the two blocks back home via the better Żabka for some fresh bread and juice. I had all day Wednesday and a chunk of Thursday morning to enjoy Wrocław.