I woke up on my last morning of train travel across Poland with a sort of sense of regret – not that I regretted finally reaching Warsaw on my eighth day of this adventure, but that I didn’t have longer in the really nice hotel room in Łódź! After the tiny apartment with unreliable water and no air conditioning in Wrocław, this felt like a palace and I wanted to stay forever. I had a nice bed, I had cool air, I had a fridge, a balcony, a big bathroom with a giant shower… and only 14 or 15 hours after arriving, I already had to check out. I had Łódź to explore and limited time to do it in – my train left at 15:20 from the station to the east of the city centre and I was on a countdown. But it didn’t make it any harder to walk out of that hotel.
I left my luggage at reception and headed north. I’d had a message from local Małgosia of portraitsonroute who I’m pretty sure I met on the walking tour in Tbilisi in early February who had sent me a list of things to visit while I was in Łódź. With only a few hours, I wasn’t going to get to them all but I’d have a go.
First up was Rosa Passage, which is just a hundred or so metres up Piotrkowska, the long and decorative street that runs the entire length of Łódź. My buggy guide in Wrocław had mentioned it too. It’s an art installation in what is now just a passage down the back of some apartments but I think used to be a hotel courtyard – thousands upon thousands of pieces of mirror mosaiced into swirling roses from floor to ceiling of the entire courtyard. Małgosia said it’s especially pretty at sunset and I wished I’d made the effort to literally cross the road the night before. I could see the potential for beauty here but on an overcast yet bright day, it wasn’t at its best. Even so, it’s quite dazzling. It’s inspired by the artist’s daughter who had a cancer of the eye and was losing her sight and it represents a retina and her fractured vision. According to the plaque by the entrance, she recovered her sight eventually. I took a few selfies but they’re not quite as shiny as the pictures where the sun hit it. Absolutely come here when it’s either properly sunny or at sunset when the sky is turning red and purple and pink.
From there, I walked up Piotrkowska to Manufaktura, which used to be a massive textile factory and is now an even more massive shopping and leisure complex. The original red brick factory buildings have been converted into a couple of art museums, activity centres, a lot of cafes and restaurants and the outdoors portion of the shops and then a huge glass modern shopping centre has been built onto it. People call Łódź the Manchester of Poland and that’s a massive oversimplification but you can see it in the red brick and its manufacturing past.
I’m going to be rude about Łódź now. My buggy guide looked at me a bit odd when I said I was going to Łódź next. It’s an industrial city – it was an industrial city – and while it’s looking for what it’s going to be from now on, it’s a bit… Polish people don’t come to Łódź as tourists and they think it’s a bit strange that anyone would. It’s not a city jam-packed with history and culture. I know “everywhere is interesting” but a significant proportion of Polish people and my guidebook are a bit disparaging about it.
I quite liked Łódź. I have a soft spot for industrial and I liked that I had a list of interesting things to see and do, more than I could possibly do in the time, while not feeling any pressure to do any of them. You know? If you go to Paris and you don’t get round to the Eiffel Tower, you’ve done it wrong. If you go to Iceland and don’t go to a thermal pool, you’ve done it wrong. If you go to any other city in Poland and don’t go to the Old Town and the market square, you’ve done it wrong. Łódź doesn’t have that.
I wanted to see Manufaktura anyway but I also wanted to go there for practical reasons. I’d gone to Poland with nothing but a pair of hiking sandals and the straps were falling out. Back home, I’d stuff some silicone glue down the holes and push the straps back in but I hadn’t brought it with me, didn’t have room in my liquids bag, and now my shoes were falling apart. I’d noticed over the last couple of days that a lot of people in Poland seem to wear that style of sandal whereas I rarely see it at home and finding a pair that suits me is a difficult task. There was clearly a shop somewhere in Łódź that had the sort of sandals I wanted. I checked out the big glass shopping centre and then resorted to Decathlon, outside in the red brick bit. There they were! I grabbed a pair and then carried on in case there was something better – I didn’t like the way the sole pointed upwards at the tip but otherwise they were perfect. Yes, there in the kids’ section. I’m not a pink person but I liked the girls’ pink sandals but they don’t come in big enough sizes. Girls’ feet aren’t supposed to go up to a 39, that’s an adult size, but they had a 39 in the boys’. They were almost exactly what I was looking for except there was something about the shade of bright blue that made them look like toys. Still, can’t be fussy. At least they’re in one piece and the toe doesn’t point upwards.
I also went into Primark. I’d come with three t-shirts and at this point, they were all pretty sweaty after my train adventures in the heat. I wanted something clean to wear in Warsaw. Maybe something long that I could wear with the cycling shorts I’d brought to wear under my sequin dress tomorrow – tomorrow! The day was almost upon me! So eventually I found a really long light blue t-shirt. Excellent.
After that, I planned to wander southwards but I was hungry. For the first time on that trip, I hadn’t had breakfast. There was a supermarket somewhere in Manufaktura – I could buy some bread and cheese. Or… I walked up the outdoor cafes and restaurants. Yes, I’d stop at the pancake place and have a pancake for breakfast! I rarely have breakfast out and I don’t often sit at cafes where I can take pictures of my food out in the sun. I spent quite a while looking at the pancake menu before choosing one with sugar, just like I’d have on Pancake Day at home but when it arrived, it wasn’t quite what I’d have on Pancake Day, in that it had been made or folded into a perfect square. How do you eat a square pancake? I rolled it up because that’s what I normally do and then tried to remember if I cut it politely with knife and fork or whether I normally pick it up with my fingers like an ape.
While I was at Manufaktura, I decided to take Małgosia’s advice again and go to the Factory Museum, which is upstairs in the building opposite, along with a dance studio and something that the people on the front desk struggled to put into words but eventually settled on “flying fox”. The museum is mostly in Polish but enough of it is in English to get the gist – the gist being that this entire area, including the art museums and the hotel along the road outside, was one giant factory, a big textile factory, all belonging to one man. Now, I daresay conditions were appalling – hours were long, public holidays were non-existent, wages were low, punishments were ripe – but I think in a way, he did care about the welfare of his workers, even if it was only in terms of optimum output. This huge place, like the Bourneville chocolate factory in Birmingham, was something of a town and home. It had a choir, it had a pool, it had its own volunteer fire brigade, it had a church, it had leisure, it had its own housing. I don’t go so far as to say the whole of Łódź was one big company town – it had 850 factories at its peak – but certainly the Poznański complex was a mini town.
But the highlight of the museum was that you could scurry up the steps, press the call button on the door to get the museum reception desk to buzz it open for you and then emerge onto the roof to look out over the Manufaktura complex. The mysterious “flying fox” is a zipline that runs across the entire width to the buildings opposite and I’d definitely have been tempted to have a go if it had been open. Honestly, the view from up there is worth the price of admission to the museum all by itself.
After Manufaktura, I walked back down Piotrkowska in the direction of something Małgosia simply called “OFF”. I stopped at the tourist information for the usual badge-that’s-actually-a-magnet and to pop into a pharmacy. I am sometimes prone to reflux and it had been really bad the night before, to the point that my insides felt all acidic and stirred up by the morning but I hadn’t brought any medicine with me. In the UK, I’d just grab a box of Gaviscon from the supermarket while stocking up on bread and juice but in Poland, you have to go into a pharmacy. I’d definitely go for the Polish word, “apteka”, apothecary, here. I stuck my head in two before being brave enough to ask for what I wanted. Most of the shop is hidden behind a high dark wood counter and a plastic screen, with just enough room for a few customers to mingle. You ask for what you want and someone fetches it. Was I even allowed to ask for it? Did I need a prescription? Did I need some medical evidence? No. I asked for what I wanted, along with a photo of the box on my phone, and the very nice girl fetched it. It wasn’t quite what I wanted but she had a look and thought it was the same ingredients, just slightly different local packaging. A few weeks on, it wasn’t exactly the same but it was close enough and certainly better than nothing. Polish apothecaries are a lot more intimidating than UK supermarkets when you discover at 4am that you’ve eaten too much plastic cheese lately.
I continued down Piotrkowska. I hadn’t realised how long it was but it just keeps going. It’s the sort of street that should be pedestrianised. This is where people stroll and there’s a permanent stream of cars crawling down the middle but also suddenly appearing out of side streets. I found the Łódź Walk of Fame, where stars on the pavement mark the achievements of anyone with even the faintest connection to the city. I found the statues of Rubinstein at his piano, Tuwim on his bench and the Industrialists sitting around their tables. I found a giant, and I mean giant, flamingo outside a pop-up bar and then at last I found OFF. It’s another converted red brick factory, not quite as vividly red and spread out at the Manufaktura complex, turned into a collection of boutiques and cafes – as Małgosia said, definitely “artsy vibe”. Definitely the sort of shops where a pink sweaty tourist with sore feet is likely to get “don’t come in here” looks. I stopped for a selfie with some neon wings and halo on the way back to Piotrkowska and then walked back up to my hotel to collect my luggage before heading back to Fabryczna station.
I knew it would only take ten minutes to get the train out to Widzew to meet my Warsaw train but I wanted to be there with at least half an hour to spare, just in case. I’d looked up what times the trains go and I was queuing to buy a ticket while looking up at the departure board to see what platform my one left from. Huh, that’s odd. That’s a familiar-looking train code. That’s a familiar-looking route. That… that’s my train to Warsaw, the one I could not get the website to tell me left from here! I spent forever the other day putting “Łódź Fabrynczna to Warsaw” into it, trying to find a train that didn’t require me to go out to Widzew first and it just didn’t exist and yet here it is, the one I’m booked on. My ticket didn’t specify stations, just Łódź to Warsaw but I thought I’d better buy a Fabryczna to Widzew just in case and then I sat and waited. Now I had waiting time because I’d expected to wait for the Widzew train and then I’d expected to wait at Widzew for the Warsaw train and instead, all that waiting had come together here and now.
I took a little while to be completely convinced this was the correct train. I’ve been caught out before getting on a train that isn’t the one it claimed to be on the platform, especially given that this wasn’t where I was planning to board it but the train itself seemed to be going to Warsaw at the time given on my timetable. It didn’t have quite the right code, that concerned me, but looking at the website and my ticket, it seemed it secretly had two or three codes. Perhaps my code was for the Łódź to Warsaw bit and this code was for the Łódź to Łódź bit. It also wasn’t going to the station in Warsaw I was expecting, which was another concern but at least it would get me to Warsaw at the time on my ticket. I was quite glad to have my tickets inspected within moments of setting off and getting it confirmed that I was allowed to be on this train.
A little over an hour and a half later, we arrived into Warsaw. I’d been expecting to come into Warsaw Centralna at 17:48 but actually, my options were Warsaw Gdańska or Warsaw Wschodnia. Wschodnia seemed more convenient and in hindsight, was far more convenient than Centralna would have been. I looked up the route to my final hotel, a little way out of the city centre and not within easy walking distance of any station for a reason that will become clear tomorrow, and found I had a choice of trams and buses. I opted for the buses and went outside to the bus station. One of my two buses was already sitting there but it was closed and locked, the driver missing. According to Google Maps, the second bus would actually depart before this one. Well, we’d see. Indeed, it did. This bus was having a break here but the next bus turned up, dropped off, picked up and was gone again in under a minute. I validated my 72-hour ticket no problem and then sat and watched Google Maps for my stop.
It was a couple of minutes’ walk along a main road, past a VW dealer and into a relatively quiet residential area to find the hotel. I was on the 10th floor but right at the end, in one of only half a dozen rooms with no balcony and with a view over the residential tower blocks behind the hotel, out past a power station and into the countryside. Not as obviously green and beautiful as the view from my apartment in Poznań but if you looked past the towers and the power station, yes, there was a lot of countryside and it was quite green. I sort of wished I’d been on the other side where I could have looked towards the city. What I mostly wished was that I had stayed somewhere else. The beautiful hotel in Łódź was at the forefront of my mind and this one lacked air conditioning and a fridge. Keeping the last of the butter and the juice cool for the next few days was going to be difficult, to say nothing of keeping myself from melting.
On the bright side, I did have a view and there was a Lidl right outside. Lidl, to be honest, was a bit of a disappointment after a week of Żabkas. All the juices, the Haribo mangos, the snacks, everything I’d eaten for a week, it’s all from Żabka, not from Lidl. I also had the issue that I was arriving on Friday and leaving on Monday and Lidl would be closed on Sunday. Cross that bridge when you get to it. I got food to keep me going on Friday evening and Saturday morning and then I’d figure out food for the rest of the weekend once I’d got my bearings in Warsaw.
It had taken eight days and eleven trains but I’d reached my final destination. I was in Warsaw!