It was grey and kind of miserable when I got up, which was great news – it was cooler today! I packed my stuff, still dithering over whether to leave my luggage at reception or whether to take it with me. How heavy was it, how annoying was it, how annoying was it to have to detour back here later on? But the problem solved itself by there being no sign whatsoever of life at reception. The luggage wasn’t that heavy. I took it with me.

It wasn’t just cool and grey outside. It was raining. Wonderful! Temperatures I can function in! I had a vague plan that I might go to the Neon Museum. Unless I wanted to start diving into museums, I’d more or less seen everything on the “must do in Warsaw” lists but this had popped up on an “other things to do in Warsaw” list and it looked interesting and as a bonus, it was inside. That’s the problem with cities, the total lack of things that are inside when it rains if you’re not into museums. The Neon Museum was one bus stop down from Wschodnia station, where I’d arrived on Friday so I got the same bus in the other direction, jumped off where Google Maps told me to and then made my way through the streets to the museum. Which was closed. Well, it’s open every day but it doesnt open until 12 and it was barely 10. I wasn’t standing there in the rain for 2 hours. I went back to the bus stop, returned to the station and left my luggage in a storage locker. It’s not that it was heavy or inconvenient, although it was – it was more that it’s not all that waterproof. At least, my personal item bag with all my particularly non-waterproof stuff in it is made of ripstop nylon, which I always describe as “waterproof like a tent – fine as long as you don’t touch the inside but you can’t use a bag without touching the inside”.

Unladen, I found a tram that was going to the city centre and discovered, a bit to my surprise, that only two or three stops down the line, it stopped outside the stadium, which has become one of my major landmarks now. I jumped off the 7 and got on a 9 instead and went through to Centrum, which is the metro station I know best, the big shopping centre and also the nearest stop for the Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw’s Stalinskie Vysotki, the big Stalin skyscraper. As is usual in any city with something tall and weird, the joke goes that the best view in the city is from its viewing platform, because it’s the one place in Warsaw you can’t see it. So up I went.

Now, maybe I could have picked a day when there wasn’t a cloud sitting just above Warsaw when I could actually appreciate views most of the way to the nearest international border but the views weren’t bad u there. There are bars across all the windows so you can’t fall off and people have decided to put love locks on them. This is probably the least romantic place in the entire city, the unwelcome unwanted Soviet monument and I really hope no one did the traditional thing and threw the key over the edge. In Wroclaw, the city authorities removed love locks (allegedly 20 tons of the things!) from a historic bridge and then put a gnome at each end to tell people that the city gnomes disapprove. It’s mostly worked except that now people put locks on the gnomes. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting love locks on the Palace of Culture. Inside, there’s a tiny cafe where you just find a seat somewhere around the hallway, there’s a mini souvenir shop (too mini!), there’s a photobooth which I think pastes you onto a backdrop of the skyscraper, a steel beam where you can have your photo taken as if you’re having lunch atop a skyscraper (or falling off it, or just smiling for the camera) and a couple of machines that give you a shiny gold coin with a picture of the building on it. I wanted one of those – I like to have things in my scrapbooks that aren’t just paper but I hadn’t been particularly inspired by any of the machines I’d found along the way. One with the square in Poznan or Wroclaw would have been nice. Some of the churches. But this would do the job! The trouble was, it only took coins and I didn’t have anywhere neaer enough. I’ve used card 98% of this trip and most of the Polish cash is still tied up in two 50zl notes. I broke one by buying a hot chocolate – wouldn’t have thought most of this week that I’d ever want a hot chocolate but it’s freezing 30 storeys up on a rainy day. Then I broke up a 10zl note by buying some postcards, which I really should have done before this morning, and then I had enough coins to buy a gold coin. It’s very pretty and worth the effort.

What did I do after that? Oh, I took the metro back to the Old Town and wandered around a bit. It’s all a lot quieter today. I don’t know if it’s the fact that it’s Monday, the rain or the fact that most of the Swifties have gone home but I could actually take a selfie with the Warsaw Mermaid without 10,000 people in the background. I could actually see the castle in Old Castle Square!

I’ve managed to miss something obvious. There’s a tram stop below Old Castle Square and it’s accessible by just taking the stairs down the side of the bridge holding the square up. So I got on a tram and started heading back to the Wschodnia, via a nice double-towered Gothic church I spotted along the way. This one is less of a touristy church than the ones in the city centre and so I tried to be really quiet and keep to the sides and the back – very difficult when your wet sandals are squealing at the top of their voices. It’s nice enough stained glass but not as breathtaking as some I’ve seen. There are portraits of people in the top of the windows and those are nicely done. I really need to do a stained glass session as soon as I can actually find one.

And then back to Wschodnia. I collected my luggage, had a minor meltdown over the lack of ticket machines, even though it says on the windows of the ticket desks “please buy tickets on the internet or use the ticket machines in the station hall” (which don’t exist!!) and then the lady sent me off to platform 6 and told me it was cheaper to buy a ticket from the machine on the train. Well, that machine looked very familiar. I found a seat, did a little research and discovered a) that regional S-trains are covered under my ZTN 72-hour ticket and that the airport, astonishly, is in zone 1.

So I made it to the station. I made it through security nice and early and thought I just had to sit and wait. I looked for most postcards and didn’t find any but I did find a Polish mug that surely must dwarf even a Sports Direct mug. How to get it home, I have no idea. I was given a bag literally the diameter of the mug and a piece of bubble wrap but the bag is far too small to put the mug in with the bubble wrap around it. First job when I find a seat is to try to sort that out.

Of course, I’d forgotten one small airport detail. I’m not done and just waiting for the plane. I have to go through passport control! And of course, because we’ve taken back control, I have to go through the all passports queue instead of popping through the electronic gates, wait for the nice border lady to figure out my recent travel history and stamp my passport while staring like angry Paddington the whole time. Her stamp needs more ink. She’s succesfully put it next to the London stamp but it’s so faint you can only just make out the PL in the corner and the date across it. That’ll be the last stamp for that passport, I guess.

Then I found a seat at my gate, wrestled with the mug and the bubble wrap and the bag, had a strop and finally produced the paper bag I got with my shopping in Berlin last week. I’d planned to use it as my shopping bag for the entire trip, but it’s turned out that I’ve shopped little and often because I’ve moved so much and my little yellow bag has mostly been enough for my daily shopping. The mug is now more or less wrapped in the bubble wrap and sitting in the paper bag next to its useless plastic bag and I’m just going to have to cling to it like a baby until I get it to the car. Now to sit here for another hour before boarding, get to Heathrow, maybe stop for food, get back to the car and drive home. Midnight, perhaps.

This morning started really slowly. I didn’t get home until much later than I’ve been out in several months, it’s hot and the wifi doesn’t really work. So I wasn’t really in the mood to leap up and go out into Warsaw. I spent the morning snoozing, writing, eating, scrolling and otherwise putting it off. Well, the longer you wait, the closer you get to the evening when it’s cooler, right? Well, I didn’t wait quite that long.

I went to get the tram and I got it all the way to Centrum, got on the metro and resumed my explorations from where I ended them yesterday. Actually, I pretty much just reproduced them but this time with a better idea of what I was seeing. I had a proper look at the Warsaw Uprising Memorial without a military ceremony on it, and the big green pillars of the government building behind it. I walked the shorter way to the Old Town and saw what I now know is the Barbakan, the old city gate (or is it – Hitler et all) and bits of the old city walls and then into the market square. Was it a bit quieter here today or was I imagining it? For a few minutes, I’d thought that tens of thousands of Swifties in town for the last three nights had all left but then I realised I was seeing the t-shirts on every other person. No, they’re still here, like me. Would Warsaw be quieter next weekend or last weekend? Or is it like any other European capital in August? Is it always going to be busy? Warsaw is a shock after all the other cities I’ve visited. Wroclaw was perhaps the busiest but it never felt quite like this and the tourism never really felt like it spilled beyond the market square even there. Poznan felt positively deserted in comparison.

I took some selfies with the Warsaw Mermaid, splashed my feet under a water pump (I’ve encountered a surprising number of these and I love them!) and headed towards Castle Square via a couple more churches and a few souvenir shops. In Castle Square, I found another old-fashioned photo stand but this one doesn’t even pretend to do any Victorian magic with his old-fashioned camera. You can see the modern lens hidden inside and he’s hardly taken it back to the table before the print-out appears, and he doesn’t pretend to hand-crank it out of the machine, either. That said, when I translated it, I wasn’t a robber in this one, but a welcome star tourist, so that’s nice.

I thought I’d go looking for a boat trip. The river is a bit of a distance from here so I needed to get to public transport. According to Google Maps, there was a bus stop two minutes away but Google Maps apparently doesn’t know that the entire middle of the New Town is closed and being dug up and that there are no buses. I diverted away from the New Town and into a park where I found a nice fountain and a bench and I sat there for a while. It’s hot, my feet are tired, I’ve done a lot of sightseeing in the last ten days and I wanted to sit for a while and let the fountain blow spray onto me every now and then. Once I got up, I encountered a man blowing giant bubbles and I did chase them and take photos of them and attempt to get them to land on my hand like a Disney princess making friends with a songbird. I didn’t chase them in the way the small children were but on the other hand, I didn’t see any other adult even pretending to notice they were there.

Now I was near a tram stop. But just up the road was a metro stop and that would take me to the river, pretty much directly to the boat trips. So I strolled up the road, chasing a delivery robot which was fun enough until I got past it and discovered it had a face. Ignore the delivery robot with a face, you can’t take it with you, it’s not coming on a boat trip with you.

The metro was line 2, which is identical to line 1 except the signs are in red instead of blue. The trains didn’t have any visible difference but the escalators had a kind of shiny ceiling with stars in it. I think this might be a line 2 thing because the station where I exited had the same thing. I came out into a patch of play fountains – grids of sprinklers spraying into the air. My bag is semi-waterproof and double-walled. My phone and camera will stay reasonably dry if I walk through it. And they did but yet again I mistook spray for “not that wet” and I was wrong.

There were no boat trips down at the river. There was a restaurant on a boat and a beach club on a barge moored alongside it and there were more eating places further down. On the other side of the river was an actual stretch of golden beach and there were signs showing that boat trips were available but there was no sign of any boat or any ticket. Well, I was near my usual tram line here. And I was near the Taylor Swift mural. Every day as I’d gone back and forth past here, I’d seen Swifties taking photos with it. I hadn’t intended to make a deliberate journey to it but I’d known that sooner or later, my explorations would naturally take me there and it had. So I crossed the road via a bridge that I swear is going to collapse in the next few months and found the right way up the side of the big bridge for my selfies. Then I had to get to the tram. It’s ridiculous how hard it can be to get to tram stops. It’s right there but you can’t just walk across the road and across the tracks. I had to go back under the bridge and take two attempts to pop up the correct staircase to end up at the tram stop and at the correct side.

I had vague hopes of maybe finding somewhere to swim or at least somewhere to sit in some nice water. Something like Liquidrom, maybe just a nice swimming pool. There are pools in Warsaw but they’re not nearby and there don’t seem to be spas, or not the kind with hot tubs and saunas, and anyway, the saunas would probably be textile-free. Come to that, there’s a spa in my very hotel but it’s the kind where you go for massages and treatments, not the kind where you spend a few hours relaxing in hot water. Bring on Friday.

And that’s all I did. Trying to get to know five cities in ten days is harder work than it sounds. I’m sure Warsaw is very interesting but either I just don’t have the capacity to be that interested by it or it really is just my least favourite of the five cities I’ve seen on this trip. If I’m coming back to Poland, it’s going to be in the winter and I think it would be to Wroclaw. I think there’s plenty there I still haven’t seen or done, or not done properly because it was too hot and I was too tired after not sleeping in that apartment with no air conditioning. I liked Wroclaw despite that. But mainland Europe for winters now. Iceland and Sapmi for summers.

And so at last I’m in Warsaw. I had plans for today – oh, such plans, and going back more than a year! – but first I needed to go out and get to know Warsaw a bit. I’d spent a week and four cities getting here.

Warsaw isn’t as navigable as anywhere else I’d been. It doesn’t really have a very obvious tight centre. It’s a big sprawly capital. Google Maps suggested an area that might be near the Old Town so I got on a tram and went there. It wasn’t the Old Town. Having now read my guidebook, I think it might be the New Town, which is a kind of old-ish town but not as old as the Old Town. Not that anywhere in Warsaw is really old. As it happens, Thursday was the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising and there have been events across the city all weekend to mark it. I knew nothing about it but I have read and learned.

Warsaw was occupied by the Nazis in September 1939. In August 1944, they mounted an uprising which ultimately failed and Hitler, in relation and anger, ordered that Warsaw should be destroyed. I knew Poland had been badly damaged in WWII but I hadn’t really realised either the extent of it or the scale of it. Entire cities were just razed to the ground, left as nothing but rubble. When I say Warsaw was wiped off the map, I mean Warsaw basically ceased to exist. The first ten years post-war were spent rebuilding it and in the case of the historic parts, using old paintings and original documents to rebuild as close to the original buildings as possible. Walking through the Old Town, you’d never realise this place is less than 80 years old. I assume the New Town is a bit like Edinburgh’s New Town – new a couple of hundred years ago, new compared to the medieval parts, not new compared to the 20th/21st century urban sprawl. Warsaw’s New Town is currently being dug up but I’ve seen pictures and videos showing it as a vibrant street with buses running up the middle of it. That’s why it’s so hard to get around – a major transport thoroughfare is closed!

I found yet another glorious brick church. I now know that if I see a shiny red brick church, I’m probably going to enjoy going in it. Not for the architecture, exactly – it’s not the style of Gothic I like, with its red brick pillars and white-painted walls, but they always have the most incredible stained glass windows. This shouldn’t be the Eras Train Tour or the Train to Warsaw, this should be Julie Discovers Stained Glass Across Poland. How does one start to become a stained glass artist and how does one get the job of making cathedral windows?

I got my photo taken with the Warsaw Mermaid – an unlikely city protector but apparently she will rise up and save Warsaw – by a Victorian lady with an old-fashioned camera. Well, I’m not stupid enough to believe it’s actually an old-fashioned camera but she did some fiddling about and it printed the front page of an oldey-timey newspaper with my picture on the front. I translated it and discovered that I stand accused of robbery across Warsaw, as does everyone else who also had their picture taken.

I continued as far as the Barbakan, which is one of the old city gates, again in red brick, along with some sections of red brick city wall and moat but then it was time to head home. I set my phone and followed the blue dot. First it took me past the modern government buildings and then to some kind of war memorial where a major ceremony involving several lines of impeccable soldiers had been standing mere moments earlier. I guessed it was something to do with the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising and this was confirmed when my phone told me the memorial was specifically to that event rather than to the war or the dead in general.

Up the road and I finally encountered Warsaw’s metro. There are only two lines and I think they only cross in one place. I was going to go two stops where it would hopefully meet my tram home. Well, it did, kind of. It emerged right in the shadow of the Palace of Culture, which is one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters. Actually, the Seven are in Moscow but there are a few in other places. I’ve stayed in the one in Kyiv which is a hotel and now I’ve found the one in Warsaw. As per usual, many people think it’s hideously ugly – Stalin had a certain recognisable taste in architecture – and that the best views are from its tower, mainly because it’s the one place in Warsaw you can’t see the thing. My tram was across the road, in the middle of a roundabout. I’ve now encountered this sort of thing a few times and it’s frustrating because you’re not really allowed to cross the road in Poland – only at zebra crossings and often with lights. To get to tram stops on roundabouts, you have to go underground and hope you can figure out the right place to pop up. Admittedly, with a little help from a blue dot on my phone, I managed and then I took the train home.

I had a few hours to rest my feet and eat and get changed and then I was going out for the reason I made this entire journey in the first place – in July 2023, I successfully got my hands on a ticket for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour here in Warsaw. Would it have been too easy to fly in on Friday and out again on Sunday? Yes. I wanted to make an adventure of it but Poland’s so big and there’s so much I wanted to see and do that figuring out how to do it was impossible and so it took until March or April to come up with the idea of coming all the way by train and letting the rail route more or less dictate my route. Wroclaw was a bit of a detour but one I’m glad I did.

And so at 5ish, I went out, feeling ridiculously self-conscious in my hand-made sequinned silver mini dress, repeating you won’t feel stupid when you get the stadium because everyone will look kind of ridiculous but that’s not very helpful when you have to walk down the road and get on a tram and ride halfway across the city first.

And no, once I got there, I felt less stupid. A bit. A lot of people were wearing sequins and costumes but my dress is kind of bulky because sequins are scratchy and utterly transparent so I lined it – with brushed cotton. Soft, but really hot and really bulky. And the sleeves don’t really fit the holes. And the neck is completely the wrong shape. But no one looks twice at a sequinned dress at a Taylor Swift show. I was at gate 10 and the tram dropped off outside gate 3 so I had half the perimeter of the stadium to walk first. Watching the queue in both directions leading to gate 3 was dismal – the tickets said to leave about an hour and a half to get in but no way was I getting in that quickly if the queue was this big. And ok, it took forever to walk to gate 10 but getting in was a breeze. I eyed the “clearing” queue dubiously – what is it? Why are there so many people there? Should I be there? But I went straight to the gate and got straight through. This was only hurdle 1. Glance at ticket, in you go. That easy? Hurdle 2 was the bag check and metal detector. I’d very very reluctantly left my camera with the amazing zoom behind as per the instructions and had only an A4 bag with the necessaries – ticket, passport, wallet, portable charger, phone and sunglasses. A4 bag that matched the dress, by the way, also handmade. I passed hurdle 2 with flying colours.

Hurdle 3 was having my ticket scanned at the next gate. No ID check, although I’d been assured they were very strict about ticket names matching official ID names to ward off resellers. And then I was in the stadium grounds and looking for door R, which was quite a long way round. At door R, I had to scan my ticket. Still no ID check. My passport had a great night out and didn’t need to do any work at all!

And I was finally inside! It had taken considerably less time to get in once I’d found gate 10 than it took to walk to gate 10 in the first place. I was in the top level but only about four rows up from the bottom of it, so about two-thirds of the way up the stadium and just a little south of the main stage. I could see the whole thing side-on and I could see a slither of the big screen but not all of it. There was a second screen on the side of the big stage structure and more screens hanging from the ceiling. This stadium has a retractable roof and we’d been told in advance it would be closed.

There was food and drink on offer – lots of Polish beer or you could have Coke/Fanta/Sprite. Here the Euro caps came into play. Normally they take the lids off and you either have to look after an open bottle for the entire show or you have to smuggle in a bottle top. But they’re attached and so I could close the bottle! It lasted me the entire show because I could put it down and it could fall over and roll around. There was also popcorn and pizza and hot dogs etc.

Paramore were on first as support and I’d been wondering at what point to put in my earplugs. As soon as Paramore walked out, apparently. I briefly took them out afterwards but it was so noisy and the crowd kept screaming at things I couldn’t see so they went straight back in.

And then it was time! Now, the Eras Tour is a tour through Taylor’s entire career, one era at a time. Each era has its own look and almost all eras have multiple alternative costumes. I’d looked at what she’d worn for each one the two previous nights in Warsaw, what she’d worn the few nights before that, what she seems to prefer and had written a list of all the costumes I predicted. I got two wrong – the massive ballgown for Speak Now was the original sparkly one instead of the layered purple one and the sequinned mini t-shirt dress for Anti Hero, the one I’d attempted to recreate for the occasion, was light purple instead of dark purple. I got absolutely everything else right! I was particularly impressed to have got the 1989 purple skirt and pink top – there are six of each and she wears them in seemingly random combinations, giving you 36 options to pick from and I got the right one! Well, I noticed it had been a while since the purple skirt had made an appearance and I’d noticed that it had been a while since the pink top had made an appearance. Yes, many people track this sort of thing.

It’s a spectacle. It can convert hardened non-Swifties (although what they’re doing entering into battle for tickets is anyone’s guess). It lasts over 3 hours, 40-something songs, 16 or so costume changes, 65-70 thousand people screaming, a fireworks finale (yes, even with the roof on!), actual curtain of actual fire streaming down when she burns down the Lover house in the Fearless transition, wristbands flashing colours and patterns all over the entire stadium, lights, sequins… However, Swifties really don’t seem to be able to sing and they mistake bellowing for emotion. I could never be Taylor Swift because I’d be standing there demanding that everyone sit down and shut up before I get started and don’t you dare scream unless someone’s actually murdering you.

I’d been a bit concerned that all the nearby tram and bus stops were closed after the show. How to get home? I’d mapped out the nearest open tram stops and I knew roughly where the metro station was but getting home was a bit of a guessing game. And once the show finished, I discovered exactly why everything was shut. It’s because you can’t get 65-70 thousand people out of one large room at the same time and expect them to physically be able to stay on the pavements. There just isn’t the space. It took a long time to force my way round to gate 3 to exit, even longer than it had taken the walk the perimeter earlier and then I had to fight my way through and with the crowd into the underpass, out towards the road home. I’d considered the possibility of walking home. It would take 45-60 minutes and I wasn’t so worried about the time or distance as of walking on my own in a strange place in the dark. Well, it seemed I wasn’t going to be on my own.

But actually, something worked to my advantage. Most people were streaming towards the city centre, in as much as Warsaw has one. I was heading outwards. There were a lot fewer of us going this way. Fewer enough that when we reached roughly where the closest open tram stop should be, there was a tram there and we were all able to get on. A lot of people got off at the next stop, which meant I could get a seat and ten minutes later, five or six of us jumped off the tram together (including a girl in a dusty pink Folklore flower fairy dress who’d been on the same tram as me going to the show six hours earlier). Most of them went into the apartment complex right outside my window so the only bit I had alone was the two or three minutes down the side of the hotel and into it. A male Swiftie in a Kelce football shirt was just arriving at the hotel a few steps ahead of me so we took the lift up together and there I was, back in my room by 11.30. What time did the show finish? 10.45ish? It had all been very easy.

But the sequins were a mistake. Not only was the dress kind of bulky and uncomfortable, it was really scratchy. By the time I was sitting down in my seat in the stadium I discovered I had scratches all over my arm from the sequins and because the bag sat on my knees most of the time I was sitting, I have some spectacular scratches on my legs 24 hours later. Next time, either just wear a flower fairy dress or go in shorts and t-shirt

Day eight and it was time to explore Lodz, which I should have started last night. And from now on, it’s Lodz without any of the Polish characters because although I know how to produce them on the tablet’s virtual keyboard, I don’t know how to do it on my real keyboard, and it’s so much quicker, easier and more natural to write these on the real keyboard.

Lodz. Lodz, until recently, was the third biggest city in Poland but people are moving out and this has allowed Wroclaw to creep in and steal that third place. Lodz is a former industrial town – at its height, it apparently had 850 factories, mostly textiles, and almost all glorious red brick things. However, the result is that among Polish people, Lodz is a bit of a joke – it’s not “pretty”, it doesn’t have a medieval merchant square, and it doesn’t have a whole lot of history before about the 1820s. But both yesterday’s buggy driver tour guide and someone on Instagram told me I couldn’t miss Rose Passage and so that was my first port of call.

Actually, my first was Piotrkowska, the main street of Lodz. Apparently it’s 3km long, which explains why pretty much everything in the city is either on it or just a couple of steps off it. And it’s where I stayed last night. Arriving in the city (via a second train because the big shiny purpose-built city centre station apparently doesn’t serve long distance trains??), it seemed a really long way – well, a kilometre is a long way when you’re carrying luggage and have been all day. My first impressions of Lodz were pretty much as Buggy Boy and the guidebook suggested, that is indeed the least pretty and most functional of all Polish cities. But then I turned right onto Piotrkowska and went “Ah, here’s the nice bit!” It’s one of these streets that should be pedestrianised, except it’s a major thoroughfare. It doesn’t have many cars up it and there are sections and crossed-roads that are one-way but every now and then, a police car or ambulance will go zooming up it with sirens and lights and it just feels like if you’re going to drive on Piotrkowska, maybe you should do it slowly and gently or find a safer way round.

Anyway, I strolled up Piotrkowska, taking in the pretty buildings, some restored, some looked after, some… not. In Wroclaw, this would be lined with the sort of shops that attract tourists, full of magnets (getting badges for my blanket has been a challenge this last week!) but there seems to be very little in the way of tourism in Lodz. I found Rose Passage. It’s an art installation. It’s just a little alleyway that leads to the back of some of the buildings but the whole thing has been covered in a mosaic of tiny mirrors that swirl into the shape of roses. The fractured mirrors distorting what they reflect represent the eye disease and blindness of the artist’s daughter but mostly it’s a place to take fun photos. I’m told it’s spectacular at sunset and I kind of wish I’d made the effort to go there last night – it’s only a couple of hundred metres up the road from my hotel.

Next was up to Manufaktura, a huge shopping and leisure centre built in and around one of the old factories. It was an enormous place, a textile factory with its own church and fire brigade and orchestra and whatnot. It finally shut down somewhere around 1990 when the fall of communism took large-scale factories like this down with it. Since then it’s been converted into this huge place, with a big glass shopping centre at one end, 50+ restaurants either inside or out in the smaller buildings. The old fire station is now a very decorative Starbucks and there’s a Primark in the old workshops. The spinning mill is now a very expensive hotel. Anyway, I needed to do a bit of shopping and a spectacular converted red brick factory is a great place to do it. First, I’ve been wearing the same clothes for a week and I’m spending a lot of time jumping on trains while carrying a bag that has no right to be as heavy as it is. I’m tired of being sweaty. So I went into the Primark in the hope of finding a dress I could wear in Warsaw to not feel so hot and sweaty and to smell reasonably clean. No success with a dress but I did find a very long t-shirt which I can wear over my black shorts. Next, into Intersport in the big glass building. My sandals have fallen apart again and have not been holding onto my foot properly. They’ve been glued back together twice but I didn’t bring the glue with me and I’m getting really tired of mountain sandals having virtually no shelf life. Intersport didn’t have what I wanted but there was an unexpected Decathlon out in the weaving mill. They had some sandals of the kind I’m looking for, but I didn’t like the shape of the toe. Further searching revealed some I liked better in the kids’ section – and there was a size 38/39! I’d rather have had the pink ones than the bright blue ones but beggars can’t be choosers and the pink ones didn’t fit.

Next, I went wandering back across the road to the little park where it occurred to me that I was hungry. So back to Manufaktura and I wandered up the restaurants until I found a pancake place. I had no idea that pancakes came in so many varieties! There were 30-odd savoury options, 20-odd sweet ones and you could add assorted sauces and even change the dough. I was boring. I went for plain sugar. I was a bit surprised when it arrived and it was a square but that was easily fixed. I rolled it up. Then I had to tackle it with a knife and fork, even though it would have been so much easier to just pick it up. I had a ride on the carousel opposite – another clause for my Big Kid Summer badge – and I went in the museum, which I’d been recommended as a quick introduction to the history of Lodz. The history of Manufaktura, maybe. A lot of it was in Polish but the basics were in English and more excitingly, I was offered a ticket to “the viewpoint”. The instructions for getting up there didn’t make sense at first but once I was up the stairs, I discovered the intercom which I had to press and discovered that the “Tyrolka?” is actually a massive zipline that goes right across to the other side of Manufaktura. I’d have been tempted if it had been open. Anyway, the viewpoint is on the top of the – actually, I don’t know what this bit of building was because it wasn’t in the panorama and therefore wasn’t labelled. Big two-storey thing that takes up that entire side of the square.

After that, I finally did head down Piotrkowska again. I needed to get some postcards and hopefully a badge – and something else. I didn’t bring my Gaviscon with me and at 4am, I found I needed it urgently. Back home, I’d just grab some in a supermarket while I was getting more juice but not here. Here, you have to go into an apteka, a chemist, where there’s a full-height dark wood divider between the customer and the entire shop and ask for what you want, like the apothecary it maybe used to be. Are you allowed to just buy it or do you need to provide some kind of medical evidence for it? Well, we’ll find out. No, you have a little conversation about how the packaging doesn’t look like you expect but it looks like it’s exactly the same product inside and then you pay and leave with it in your bag.

I was headed for OFF, the next place on my personal recommendations list. This is off Piotrkowska but it’s a 35 minute walk from Manufaktura, which is also pretty much off Piotrkowska, to give you an idea of how long this street is. I got there eventually, via most of the other attractions in Lodz – statues, fame stars in the ground, a so-called superhero I initially took to be a missionary who’s walking around with a little acyrilic box collecting money for Ukrainian children – all currencies except Russian roubles please. No, I didn’t hand any money over to the stranger with no credentials beside a red tie and a smart white shirt. The best way to get money to Ukrainian children is via organisations like the Red Cross or the DEC, not random men in the street who start their pitch with “Is it true all English women use fake tan on their face? I think it is ugly”.

Anyway. A feature of all Polish cities seems to be fountains coming straight out of the ground – rather than the kind in their own basins, so you can walk among them and get your feet wet. I did that in every fountain I found. Lodz was hot but overcast, so it was miserable in the way Berlin was on Saturday. My phone said it was due to rain between about 6pm and 6am and it felt like it.

As I was saying, I got to OFF. It’s another converted factory, only a lot less shiny. The word “hipster” came to mind and stayed there. This is apparently a good place to eat and drink and spent your evenings but it’s a bit lost on someone who doesn’t really eat or drink. Still, I’d seen it, I’d used up a chunk of my time and now I’d pretty much “done” Lodz. It’s a much more likeable place than many Poles apparently give it credit for but I think you don’t need more than a day to feel like you’ve seen it.

Back to the hotel to get my bag and then back to Fabryczna, the so-called main station. I needed to get a ticket back to Widzew so I could catch my train from there to Warsaw. I stood scanning the departure board for the next train to Widzew when something caught my eye. A train to Warsaw, leaving five or ten minutes before mine is due to leave from a station five or ten minutes down the line. I got out my ticket, compared the times, compared the train number, opened DB’s website and looked up my train. Yes, that was my train leaving from Fabryczna. The website had sworn blind I couldn’t do that. I’d tried and tried to get a train that left from the actual local central station. Ok, well, instead of taking an earlier train so I’m at Widzew in plenty of time for my train, I’ll just… get my train. I bought a ticket for the Fabrynczna to Widzew bit just in case my ticket got checked and then I bought a drink and a Mars bar and found somewhere to sit. I’d arrived a bit early but I wanted to get the train with plenty of time so I didn’t miss my planned train at Widzew. Without having to build in that time, I suddenly had a lot of time to kill at the station.

My train was already there when I finally made my way down to platform 3, track 2. I checked, double-checked and then triple-checked. This is definitely the train on my ticket. Why isn’t it going to Warsaw Centralna? My ticket says Centralna but this doesn’t. But it’s IR 10143/2, leaving Fabryczna at 16:14 and Widzew at 16:20 and due into Warsaw around 6pm. It’s definitely my train. Well, maybe it can’t fit all the in-between stops on the board and it’ll stop at Warsaw Centralna.

Guess what? It didn’t!

Actually, Warsaw Wschodnia is a little more convenient. I’d looked up public transport on the way, so I knew I wanted a three-day ticket (Poland is so good at having exactly the ticket I need – 48 hours when I had 48 hours in Wroclaw, 3 day when I have 3 days in Warsaw – ok, I didn’t bother with trams in Poznan or Lodz) and I found a ticket machine which was very keen for me to understand that I needed to validate my ticket. Thanks, I got that. Then I had to find the right side of the station for my bus. I’ve got that wrong every single time so far. The signs under the station give street names and a few clues for which side you want but it’s not until I pop up and open Google Maps to look for my stop that I discover I’m on the wrong side.

Walk back through. Spot bus 123 passing. Scurry up to it. Discover it stops and sits here for 10/15 minutes. The 173, my other option, is due in 4 minutes. And it was the 173 that got here first. Six or so stops down the road, walk through the towers and there I am. I walked into blissful air conditioning, handed over my ID almost before I was asked (and had it refused because the driving licence that’s closer to hand than my passport and has been accepted at Lodz, Wrocaw and Poznan suddenly “isn’t ID”) and then up I went to the 10th floor. From the outside, I hadn’t realised this place even has a 10th floor but it does. No air conditioning all the way up here. I can open the windows terrifyingly wide although I can’t then close the curtains around them so here’s hoping it’s not too hot at night. The wifi is pretty rubbish up here too. It’s not a bad room, it’s just nowhere near as gorgeous as the one I had last night. No fridge either. But it’s nice to know that the next time I have to pack up and shoulder my luggage is to go to the airport to go home.

I slept a bit better my second night in Wroclaw. It rained overnight so it was a bit cooler. The neighbours were just as noisy though and then, as if to make up for all the water outside, the water in the building stopped working. By the time I’d had my breakfast, it had rumbled and sloshed back into life but it was still weedy and it tended towards the brown and bitty. No teeth-brushing for me and I had to put 48-hours of plates and knives in the dishwasher instead of washing them myself.

Then out I to Wroclaw for a few hours. There are advantages to having your own mini-flat but luggage storage is not among them. The luggage either had to be carried all the way down to the station where I’d have to figure out the lockers – if I had enough coins – or it would have to come with me. So it came with me. I headed first for the big square, mostly because I didn’t really know where else to go but partly because I was curious how different it would look by day rather than by evening. And in the square I found electric golf buggy tours. I’d seen them around and wondered how to get on one and here they were. I could see Wroclaw properly and without having to carry my luggage on my back! I ended up on a private tour (and wondering how on earth much this was going to cost!) around both squares, over to Cathedral Island via the Jesuit University, round to the newest and ugliest market square and back to the beginning. I didn’t see a lot I hadn’t already seen but I got it explained and off my feet.

When we got back, my tour guide recommended a pretzel, as they’re a thing in Wroclaw that he doesn’t think they have in Warsaw. So off I went and got a pretzel. I enjoyed the salt crystals but it did make me think, this is the only form of dry bread that it’s generally acceptable to just eat, isn’t it? If I ate a roll in the street with no cheese, people would think that weird.I did a couple of little adventures by tram, mostly just to kill time, and then headed for the station. Penultimate train, I’m off to Łódź. There was a small problem with the train, though. It was due at platform 1 at 13:55. At 13:35, the 13:02 was still sitting there, occasionally making noises like it was trying to move and then giving up with a groan. Was it going to move or was it going to be my train that moved? I went up and down between the platform and the departure board at least four times in those 15 minutes before the 13:05 finally vanished and the Łódź – well, Ełk via Łódź and Warsaw – train arrived.

Air conditioning! Large neighbour who played music so loudly even through his headphones I could sing along. It was 3 hours to Łódź and then a kilometre hike to my hotel. Such a nice hotel! How am i managing to book the nicest places for the towns I’ve only got one night in?? I should have gone out. I got as far as the Carrefour City on the next corner (Zabka immediately outside the hotel was an option but I like a Carrefour) and then came home and that was it.

I’m on a train for the next three hours, might as well make use of it.Wednesdy. (My birthday). Wednesday might as well have started on Tuesday morning. I’d arrived at my apartment in Wroclaw on Tuesday evening, see St Elizabeth’s and the market square and then gone back to the apartment. Reviews said it was quiet because it’s on a residential courtyard away from the town centre. Well, the location was accurate but it wasn’t quiet. There was the couple yelling from the other side of the courtyard until 4am, there was the person who sneezed 3000 times and was determined that everyone within half a kilometre should hear it (turns out there are two of these people in my courtyard!) and also it was so hot. I think I snoozed a bit about 6am but that was about it.

So I got up, went down to the Zabka on the corner for some fresh bread, didn’t succeed and had to go to the one on the next block, had a nice breakfast of fresh bread and butter and cold juice from my fridge and then decided I was going to the Aquapark first thing. I’d decided I was doing it at some point but being in the water during the hottest part of the day seemed a good idea. So off I went for a tram. The trouble with Wroclaw compared to Berlin is that when you want to go somewhere, the map will say “take this tram from this stop in three minutes. Otherwise, you’ll need to walk 300m to a different stop to get that tram in five minutes. But if you miss that, go to one 300m in a different directions and try there”. And then when you get there, the trams obviously aren’t running on Google Maps’ schedule anyway. Anyway, I managed to get on a tram that would go towards the Aquapark and then walk the last 5-9 minutes.

The Aquapark is a huge water park, as its name suggests, with a lot of play pools and slides but it also has a lane pool, a gym and an 18+ saunarium. I liked the idea of the saunarium, especially the onsen pool but I soon discovered why it’s 18+ – these things are textile-free just like in Germany but you’re supposed to have a towel to sit on in the sauna and I don’t generally travel with two towels. Well, I do if I’m going to Iceland but then I expect to be in a pool every single day, whereas here it’s just when the opportunity comes up. So I had a quick dip in the onsen pool and then returned to the family-friendly area. There’s a big kids’ pool, with mini slides and waves that go off every half an hour and last nearly 20 minutes and a lazy river that takes you in a loop outside and there’s a swim-through door to the outdoors pool. On a hot July day, it was packed. It had a sort of cafe-restaurant inside the pool area and there was a second, smaller, quieter, darker cafe/bar in the saunarium. I don’t now if you buy food and drink on your electronic wristband or whether you’re supposed to take your card with you. Bracelets make more sense.

I came back from the Aquapark quite late in the afternoon and had a late lunch then I decided I really should go out again. To Cathedral Island, that sounded good. Seven Gothic churches on one island. The trouble was, the only one that was really open had a dress code and I couldn’t go in because Jesus disapproved of my knees. The big cathedral was good – more good stained glass – but it had a service going on. I lurked at the entrance and took pictures of the great east window but that was about all I could get at.It was hot. It was getting on for 7pm by then and the temperature was not dropping. I was too hot to walk any further so I jumped on a tram, which had a modicum of air conditioning. Didn’t really matter where it was going but following our progress on the map, it stopped at the square where I got off yesterday evening. I could get to the big square from here and find a pavement cafe for a drink. I was so hot and thirsty that my mouth had turned to syrup. On the way into the square, I found a fountain which was spraying water into the air in a way it probably wasn’t meant to. It made a great photo with the setting sun behind it and obviously I walked through it. Somehow I wasn’t expecting it to be as wet as it was. But then when I got to the other side of the square, there was another fountain doing the same thing. This is clearly just how they cool down in Wroclaw. I didn’t find a suitable cafe. Most of them are restaurants or proper bars – a flight of mini beers in a spectrum from bright yellow to bright red looked appealing but their menu didn’t seem to suggest they were big on Coke or Fanta.

In the end, I went to the Zabka and bought a can of something cold and fizzy and with 20% apple and watermelon juice in it. Apple juice isn’t very tasty when it’s fizzy but at least it was cold. I found a slab of decorative concrete to sit on and sat there watching the square while it gradually got cooler. At last I decided I’d had enough of enjoying the square and the drinking something cold on the pavement and headed home – but I stopped in the opposite corner to watch a man spinning fire. He lit a kind of extra-long one-ended poi (I’m going to have to find out what that it!) and left it burning on the ground, spun it around, extinguished it and then lit up a fire staff, which he also left on the ground. No sign of singeing this morning – I assume that the fuel burns so enthusiastically that the fire doesn’t have a chance to burn anything else, although now I’m attempting to put it into words, it sounds beyond stupid. But it did stink of fuel and there were lovely little black clouds puffing off it.I stocked up on snacks on the way home and then was too tired or too hot or both to eat them before going to bed.