It’s now Thursday and I’m about to move on to my penultimate city!
I woke up in Wrocław to find the water was off in my apartment. I had a day and a half of plates and glasses to wash, which is no problem – ten minutes in the sink, except there’s no water! That’s not a good start to the day! So I used up another glass for juice with breakfast, because another dirty glass is preferable to carrying a half-finished carton of juice in my so-called hand luggage for the day but halfway through breakfast, there was a lurch and a rumbling and the water came back on. However, it never stopped being gritty and brown and bubbling uncomfortably like there was more air than water in the system. I gave up on washing the dishes and put them in the dishwasher instead – it’s a teeny-tiny thing smaller than the average microwave and while I’d like to have put them away, at least they’d be clean.
I’d planned to have another half-day in Wrocław but I hadn’t taken into account that I’d need to deal with my luggage. It was a private apartment – it doesn’t have a reception, I can’t leave my luggage there until lunchtime and I have two options. The first is to go to the main station and deal with the left luggage lockers. But I’d had trouble with them in Poznań because I didn’t have any coins and I couldn’t figure out how to use the card option. By now I had coins but nowhere near enough and anyway, it’s a long way back to the station when I want to start my day in the square a five minute walk away. So my other option is to take the luggage with me.
What I’m carrying on my adventure is as so: my main bag is my 40l Osprey Fairpoint 40, which I bought in late 2017 and has been my general purpose carry-on bag ever since. It’s full to the brim and weighs a ton. I’ve also got my Personal Item bag, a nylon zipped tote bag I made in early 2023 specifically to the size requirements on Icelandair, which has been my under-the-seat bag ever since. Last, I have a yellow nylon bag based on the Uniqlo half-moon bag but much more capacious while being small and light enough to screw up and shove into the corner of my big bag. This is my day bag and contains my essentials, like my phone, wallet, sunglasses and things I want close at hand. Plus, let’s be honest, everything that doesn’t fit in the other two bags. While my adventure is a train adventure, I’ll be flying home at the end and so I need everything to be BA hand luggage only-friendly. Travelling with only hand luggage sounds nice and easy but that big bag is heavy and with the Personal Item, I only have one hand free. But I don’t have a lot of choice so off I go, into Wrocław for a few hours laden down.
I’d spent the last two evenings in Stary Rynek, the old market square, but I’d not seen it by day. It’s busy in the evenings but it’s much quieter in the morning. I strolled, already weighed down by the backpack, looked at the quiet square, looked for the scorched patch where the fire performer had put down his staff and meteor the night before (didn’t find it) and then spied the electric tour buggies. I’d seen them zooming around Cathedral Island the evening before and wondered how you went about getting on one of them. Well, you go to the corner of Stary Rynek and Plac Solny, the smaller pretty square attached to the big pretty square. There, there were a dozen buggies waiting. I looked. I thought. And then I was approached – in German. I clearly read as tourist (well, of course I did, I was carrying a massive backpack!) but tourists in Wrocław are primarily German. I was coaxed into going on one of these tours and a driver who spoke English was summoned.
Now, I didn’t get his name. My Polish is terrible. What I did get was that I was having a private tour. These buggies seat maybe six and from the leaflet shoved into my hand, I could see that the price for joining a tour and the price for a private tour were substantially different. Let’s be really honest here. An hour-long tour on one of these things is about £70, which is incredibly and obscenely expensive. I’d only paid £90 for two nights in the Wrocław apartment and the train I’d be travelling 140 miles on later was less than £11, to give you a sense of scale. These things absolutely exist to exploit tourists from western Europe. I wedged my luggage under the seat, got on and off we went, while I wondered how on earth much I was going to end up paying for this private tour. Spoiler: £70. I have no idea how I came to be charged the usual price for a shared tour when I had it to myself but I’m not complaining. Anyway, I knew I hadn’t spent much in Poland – I had a 48-hour public transport ticket in Wrocław and I’d been to the Aquapark but other than that, I’d bought a couple of badges and eaten bread and butter from supermarkets and if all I spent on entertainment the entire trip was £70, I wasn’t doing badly.
Anyway, I wasn’t so much going on this trip because I wanted to be shown around Wrocław but because I wanted to put my luggage down. You pay a premium for being lazy.
I told my tour guide that over the last 24 hours, I’d seen various bits of Wrocław but I didn’t really know a lot about it. He was very happy to explain all the things I’d looked at. One thing did confuse me – I’d been told Wrocław is pronounced something like “Vrots-waff” but he definitely pronounced it “Vrots-laff” and it seemed he was a local boy – he talked about Warsaw the way people I was at infant school with talked about London, like it’s some massive and exotic city full of sin and wonder which you can only dream of actually visiting. I’d spent months practicing pronouncing Wrocław without getting distracted by the letters and here he was threatening to smash that practice down.
We started in the smaller square, the salt square. There’s a big movie museum underneath the square, in what used to be a massive air raid shelter. The flower market here is open 24 hours, so if you fall out with your other half at 3am, you can come here to get your make-it-up flowers. And lastly, it’s called the salt square because this was where salt and other valuable goods were brought and traded, right back since the Middle Ages. Then we moved into the old market square. The Gothic town hall was built in the 13th century, suffered minimal damage in WWII and now is more a museum and cafe than administrative building. The square, one of the largest in Europe, also dates back to the 13th century and also mostly survived the war. There’s been some restoration over the centuries, especially around the late 19th century, so it’s not really original but neither is it secretly post-war.
At last, we crawled out of the square – nearly half of our allotted hour was already up and we’d only moved a couple of hundred metres – and down an alley and round to a narrow lane that I’d paused at on my way to the square in the first place. This lane, which looks quite medieval, was once the butchers’ quarter and is now a row of arts, crafts and souvenir shops. It’s got a collection of bronze animal statues to commemorate its original purpose. From there, we paused at one of the big churches at the side of the square. I can’t remember if it was St Elizabeth’s, the one I visited on my evening or St Mary’s with the Bridge of Penitents joining the two towers. I wish I could have walked across that bridge but laden down as I was, I wasn’t going to climb a church tower. It’s on my list for when I one day go back to Wrocław – another spoiler, I liked Wrocław and would like to go back one day and do it properly.
Our next stop was one of the university buildings. Wrocław is a university town, with a huge proportion of students and we went to one of the picturesque buildings. This place is open to the public if you turn up at the right hour of the day. It wasn’t open when we got there. My guide pointed to the naked man statue, holding up a sword. There’s a student tradition here of stealing this sword. I very specifically asked if the sword gets returned or if someone has a cupboard full of spare swords that are popped into his hand every time the last one gets stolen but the answer somehow seems to be both at the same time, so I have no idea what the truth is.
Next, we crossed to Cathedral Island. I got the full story of the Wrocław dwarfs, including the one where people put so many love locks on the bridge over to the island that it almost collapsed. The town cut them all off and then put a dwarf at each end, one chained to a giant lock and the other cutting open a lock. See, even the dwarfs of this city disapprove of locks. It’s mostly worked, in that there are now only a handful of locks on the bridge but the locks attached to the dwarfs are now invisible underneath more love locks.
We had a quick jaunt through the city, stopping at St John’s, the big cathedral. My guide explained its history, including the fact that with the front end and back end being built at different times, the cathedral has a seam down the middle where the two halves don’t match, by a good couple of inches. I mentioned that yesterday but I hadn’t noticed it at the time. If you don’t know, you assume it’s just a minor architectural design feature that you don’t even notice.
Our last stop on the way back to the square was at the Racławice Panorama, a circular building with crown-like buttresses sticking out all around, which contains a circular panoramic painting depicting the 1794 Battle of Racławice during the Polish-Lithuanian Kościuszko Uprising. It’s a major tourist attraction in Wrocław and is on my when-I-come-back list.
As we came back into the old market square, my guide asked “Have you had a pretzel?”. “No,” I said. “Should I? I haven’t heard about pretzels”. Apparently they’re a thing in Wrocław, a local specialty and probably not available in Warsaw. I should definitely try one before I leave. I was dropped off back in the corner of Plac Solny where we started, my guide took me into the tourist information centre so I could pay for my tour by card (for a moment, I thought I was going to walk away without actually paying) and as I walked off to find a tram, I passed the pretzel place he’d recommended. Ok, I’d have a pretzel.
It took a moment. I’m accustomed to walking into the little Żabka convenience stores, picking up what I want and paying for it with an awkward smile in place of Polish conversation. But here, you walk up to a hatch and request what you want. I can’t do it in Polish and I feel really ignorant and arrogant doing it in English, so initially I walked past. Can’t buy a pretzel. Then I decided I was being a chicken. I’m a grown-up. I can buy a pretzel in Poland. I can talk to a stranger who doesn’t share a language. So I walked up to the hatch and peeked through at my options. There were pretzels coated in cinnamon, in slices of salami, poppy seeds, cheese, icing sugar, all sorts. I spied plain-looking ones and then I spied the word “sól”. Aha! Plac Solny is the Salt Square and sól is clearly just plain salt. So I requested a salt pretzel and found a bench to eat it. It was a perfectly good pretzel, warm and with chunks of sea salt embedded in it, but it did occur to me that this is one of the rare occasions when it’s socially acceptable to basically eat dry bread outside. Normally people will look oddly at you and wonder why you don’t add some butter or cheese or meat but when it’s stretched out and curled into a pretzel, that’s ok. Yes, it was a perfectly good pretzel – I’ll have another next time I’m in Wrocław – but it was far too big to eat the whole thing in one go.
I still had a couple of hours. I used some of it to randomly ride up and down on whatever tram came along next and some of it to eat a cookie and drink a cup of apple juice at the station McDonald’s and then it was time to go to the platform for my train to Łódź. Now, this was difficult. I waited for the departure board to tell me my platform but when I got there, twenty minutes before my train was due, the previous train was still sitting there, supposed to have left half an hour ago and clearly in mechanical trouble from the way it kept firing up the engine, making odd sing-song noises and then subsided. I swear, I bobbed up and down from the platform upstairs to the station downstairs four times checking, double checking and triple checking that the platform hadn’t been changed. My long-distance train couldn’t come through a platform where there was a train sitting. They weren’t moving the train. My train was going to have to come on another platform. What if I missed it?
I didn’t. A few minutes before my train was due, the late one vanished and everything happened very much as scheduled. I put my bag in the luggage rack, made myself comfortable and headed for Łódź. My tour guide and my guidebook had both been vaguely disparaging towards Łódź. It’s quite an industrial town, it’s not terribly touristy and Polish people will apparently look at you a bit sideways for deciding to go there. Until recently it was Poland’s third largest city but with the decline of industry, people have been moving out and Wrocław has now taken its place as third largest. The train trip was uneventful except for one thing. Łódź has a nice new modern station right in the city centre, which is where I’d assumed I’d be arriving but actually, the train went to Łódź Widzew, which is the main station to the east of the city centre. From here, I had to get a local train back to Łódź Fabryczna, the big central station. I had about twenty minutes to wait after I’d run down to the ticket desk to buy the ticket for that bit of journey and then went back to the right platform. It seemed there was a group of school kids coming back from a long camp. They all had massive suitcases with sleeping mats strapped to their backpacks and clearly the parents were arriving to collect them. Several of them had matching gold necklaces on and more of them than I’d expect were crying. One girl stood clinging to her mother, just crying, for a solid five minutes before either of them moved. Others weren’t quite ready to go home and disappeared among the crowds and, it turned out, about half of them were waiting for the train to the city centre rather than leaving the platform and going to the car.
It only took five minutes to get back into central Łódź, into a freakishly quiet big shiny main station. I’d booked a hotel here, rather than the apartments I’d had in Poland so far, and I’d chosen it to be a quick and easy walk from the station. That had been my aim everywhere and so far, it had only really worked out in Poznań. Again, here I’d underestimated the scale of the map. Strava says it was 1.1km from the station to the hotel, a bit more than the “come out of the station, turn right, walk up the road and then turn right again into the hotel. No, I had to make my way through the tram terminus, through a park, half a mile along a fairly busy and not very picturesque road and then onto Łódź’s decorative street where I had to keep an eye on the map because the hotel was surprisingly unobtrusive.
It was a really nice hotel, considering I only paid £58 for the night! Like the apartment in Poznań, this was a case of “why do I only get one night in the good places??”. It’s all green and gold, I got my room card in a little calligraphed envelope, I had a balcony and a big shower and although I filmed it, it wasn’t until later that I discovered I hadn’t taken any photos of it. It had air conditioning and a fridge and after spending the morning carrying my luggage around, I was quite content to drop everything and flop onto the bed. I only had 24 hours in Łódź and I absolutely should have used some of my evening but I’d got into Widzew at 5pm so it was probably getting on for 6.30pm by the time I got back into the city centre and walked to the hotel and I wasn’t in the mood for any more walking. I went to the nearest supermarket – actually, I didn’t. I skipped the usual Żabka in favour of the the nearly Carrefour Express, where I bought some more fresh bread and some juice and then I retreated to my bed to eat it with a book. Łódź could wait until the morning.