Category Archives: poland

Day five: Poznan to Wroclaw

The trouble with deciding to spend a chunks of 24 or 48 hours in various places is you end up either having to carry everything with you or figure out places to leave them all morning or afternoon. I was lucky yesterday when I arrived in Poznan – my apartment was ready and I could just move in and go out. Today I left my luggage at reception…..

I had a train to Poznan at 16:44 which left the best part of an entire day to enjoy Poznan. I started it with running to the Zadka across the square for some fresh bread for breakfast, got packed up slowly and left the apartment and particularly the view very reluctantly. This apartment is too nice for just one night! Much too nice!

On the other hand, I did like the market square. So I walked down into the old town, in search of more old buildings and churches. I found the pink parish church, which was nice enough but so unmemorable I can’t even describe it. Then I found myself back in the market square. I found lots of places to sit in the shade, by a fountain just outside the square and soon it was 11.30. Now, the symbol of Poznan is a pair of goats which emerge from the tower above the town hall and butt heads twelve times at noon. I’d just been cheerfully thinking that there’s not a lot in the way of either tourists or tourist shops in Poznan but there they all are, standing in the shade opposite the town hall, cameras aloft. Oh, it’s all a bit of a drama! First the bell chimes twelve times, then a man with a clarion appears on a balcony and plays something that doesn’t sound entirely unlike the Last Post and then the goats appear. The whole thing takes about three minutes and some tourists, after waiting there for half an hour or maybe longer, get bored and walk away before the goats have finished. This astonishes me.

After that, I decided to wander east towards Poznan Cathedral. It’s on the other side of the river and there are a couple of other buildings in the complex, including a kind of half cut-off Gothic brick thing I’d really like to have seen inside. But the cathedral itself is another blocky red-brick thing that doesn’t look very Gothic from the outside but is interesting from the inside. It’s not as intricately detailed as the exhibition in Berlin but it’s still very pretty and very interesting. It’s got pillars that are part stone and part brick, endless interesting side chapels, some nice modern stained glass and – star of the show – a golden chapel. You can put 5zl in a slot to switch on the lights, at which point is becomes truly breathtaking.

Then I took a long stroll back via another long sit in the market square, a stroll back up to the park opposite the tower where I sat and enjoyed the duckpond and then it was time to collect my luggage and get my train. The train, according to the departure board, was from platform 11. Platforms in the station only go up to 6. Where’s 11? Aha, 7-11 are downstairs and outside. I couldn’t figure out how to get to 10 and 11 – I tried going up the steps back to the road and down the other side but that only took me to 10. There’s no connection to 11. Of course, it’s not as hard as that, there’s an underground passage joining 7 to 11 and all the others in between. Polish stations are weird – you have a platform number but you also have a track number. Seeing track 2, platform 2, track 3 on the way was really odd and took a moment to figure out. Anyway, the train arrived shortly after I did because Polish trains have a habit of stopping for an extended time at major stations – 21 minutes at Poznan and 15 minutes once we reached Wroclaw so there’s no need to rush to grab your luggage and jump off. It’s about an hour and a half from Poznan to Wroclaw and I had my own seat (unreserved this time, I checked several times) with a window, an empty luggage rack above it and air conditioning in the windowsill.

Smartphones have made the chances of accidentally jumping off in the wrong place somewhere between exceedingly difficult and actually impossible, which reduces accidental adventures but makes planned rail adventures much more efficient. I got to Wroclaw. I knew I needed to get a tram from the north side of the station. Seeing a sign for centrum, I followed it, only to emerge opposite Wroclawia, a big shoppipng centre that I knew was on the opposite side of the station. Turn round, march back through. There are ticket machines right at the tram and bus stops, so I got my 48 hour ticket, missed the 7 tram with a five minute walk and had to take the 8 with a 10 minute walk. The trouble was, the validator on the tram didn’t validate my ticket. Is it supposed to? It’s got a slot exactly the size of the ticket but when I stuck it in, it didn’t do anything. The internet says to validate them but it also says something incomprehensible about the linked payment card, which makes me wonder if I’m supposed to zap my bank card to validate my ticket – or possibly to pay contactlessly without meaning to. I’ll get on another tram tomorrow and try again.

Anyway, a ten minute walk took me to my apartment. That is, it took me to the restaurant right outside. I had quite detailed instructions including six pictures, making getting into the apartment a bit of a scavenger hunt. Clue 1: “right outside” actually means “opposite, on the other side of the road”. My apartment is on the third floor, keep to the left. That wasn’t so easy. Third floor? Up three floors I went and there was nothing but a blank wall on the left. I went back through my emails in search of an apartment number. Aha, number 5. Go to the door with a five on it. No key safe next to it and it didn’t match the scavenger hunt photo. It turns out you go up to the first floor and then step through into, effectively, the next building, and up some more stairs which run in the wrong direction up the middle of the building. But there it was – a door with the right number, a key safe and a piece of paper pinned to it which has the name of the apartment and the Airbnb and booking.com logos. I opened the key safe, unlocked both the locks and let myself into my next apartment. Not as nice as the one in Poznan, besides the difficulty in getting up to it. The view is over the courtyard where you access the backs of several similar buildings and the apartment is just one small room. It’s not unpleasant but yesterday’s was so much better. A waste to only spend one night there, I’m telling you.

Once I’d settled in, it was time to go out and refill my fridge. Yet again, there’s a Zadka every couple of hundred metres. Two blocks down is another Gothic church, and it was open at 7.30. It’s of a pretty similar type to Poznan’s cathedral, less impressive, but with better windows. Whoever presumably commissioned these windows after the war knew what they were doing. Oh, these are good windows! Lots of them are fire-themed and I swear one of them is things zooming around a burning Earth.

Right outside the church is Wroclaw’s market square – just as beautiful as Poznan’s, possibly bigger, and more commercial. Lots of tourists here. Tourist shops still open this time of night, packed pavement cafes and restaurants, banks and McDonalds, Burger King, Dominoes and KFC, all disguised as matching pavement cafes. There are fire jugglers and all sorts entertaining the tourists. Poznan but bigger.

So that’s my plan for the next day or two. Aqua Park, cathedral island and more time in the market square. I suspect my time in Poland is going to be a whirlwind of pretty squares and Gothic churches.

Day four: Berlin to Poznan

This was the other travel day that I was a bit concerned about. When I first had the idea and began putting the route together, back in March or April, there was a direct train which continued to Warsaw. Tht fr in advance was just too far to book, though, and by the time it was allowed, it had become a local train to Frankfurt Oder, on the Polish border, followed by the express to Warsaw, jumping off at Poznan. But a week or so – probably less – before I set off, I got an email from Deutsche Bahn saying that my journey didn’t exist anymore and to click here for alternatives. Do I even need to say that there were no alternatives?

No, there are always alternatives. I went back to DB’s ticket booking system and discovered that the alternative was to weave my way through Berlin’s public transport system, with half of the S-bahn in the city centre missing, to Erkner, at the far end of the S3. I could get on that local train from there to Frankfurt and then back on the original Polish Intercity that I’d originally planned. What I actually did would depend on where my local stop was, whether it was convenient, what the best route was from there and exactly which bits of Berlin were closed. My nearest station was a couple of hundred metres away at Naturekundemuseum, which is on the U6 – so much easier than taking the tram two stops west to Hbf and starting from there. I’d looked at my connections and I needed to be on the U-bahn by 8.45 to get to Frankfurt with enough time to not feel stressed and in the end, I was on it by about ten past eight. A few stops south to Friedrichstrasse, moment of “where is platform 6???” (DB helpfully gives platforms to save you the hassle of finding a departure board!) and onto the S3. Moment of doubt here because according to the signs, eastbound trains left from the left-hand side and westbound from the right but the eastbound Erkner train was on the right – agreed by both the electronic departure board and all the signs inside the train. By the time we reached Alexanderplatz, I was satisfied because there the signs were on the correct side – but the fact we reached Alexanderplatz at all said we were going in the right direction.

Erkner is right out in the woods. The electronic boards don’t bother listing half the stops, so at least twice I thought we’d reached the end of the line and we hadn’t. Then we came into platform 32 and I had to find the train on platform 2. Actually, the S-bahn lines are all numbered in the 30s and then down the side is the mainline station which may have more than one or two platforms but the Frankfurt train was waiting right there. I was expecting something like a slightly overgrown metro train and this was a full-size double-decker real train. Of course I sat upstairs!

It was only 35 minutes on the local train to Frankfurt. An easy transfer to the right platform and there sat the Warsaw Express, more than 40 minutes before it was due to depart. I was suspicious. The last time I got on a train that was waiting on the platform suspiciously early was in Helsinki and instead of ending up in the Arctic, I ended up going through the train wash and into the rail depot ten miles up the road. So I lurked. “See if other people get on” isn’t foolproof because that’s exactly what I did in Helsinki but it all seemed real enough. The signs on the train – at least on the outside – matched up and once I was aboard and looking dubiously at the signs in the corridor which gave nothing more than the date and time, I spied railway staff directing people onto the train and into the correct coaches.

You get assigned seats here, whether you like it or not. I was in coach 368 (why not just number them 1-4?) and seat 15. Polish trains, as far as I can see from this one and the one I got from Sopot to Gdansk a few years ago, tend towards compartments rather than rows of seats. My seat was by the window and facing forward and my compartment empty. I hoisted my bag onto the luggage rack, took out my phone charger and plugged it into the green-illuminated personal socket next to my seat and made myself comfortable. Not so comfortable when a large man with an even larger suitcase came and sat next to me. Nothing personal, that’s just his assigned seat. I was pretty convinced that suitcase was falling out of the rack and killing someone on the way, though. And then a couple with a kid came and filled up three of the remaining four seats and the last role was taken by a girl who looked far too young to be travelling across national borders – albeit Schengen ones – by herself.

We sat together on that train for the best part of half an hour before it finally set off – late. I can see no reason why a train that’s been sitting there for so long should be late departing. My compartment-mates had pretty much eaten their lunches before we left.

It was a little over an hour and a half to Poznan. Five or ten minutes maximum to the river that forms the border just here and then ninety-ish minutes of green countryside, wind turbines, builders yards, farmland and the occasional small town before we reached Poznan.

Poznan Glowny, the main station, was very busy. It was just after 12.30pm. I had the afternoon to explore but what to do with my luggage? As far as I could see, only four of the luggage lockers took cards and I had no Polish currency at all, let along coins. Well, my apartment is in the tower literally on the other side of the road so I’d go over there, see if I could get in (unlikely, two hours early) and leave my luggage if not. It turned out the room was ready – well, the cleaner was just leaving as I walked through the door. I’m on the 16th floor, overlooking the station, some of the more high-rise part of town and mile after mile of trees, chimneys and more greenery. 10/10 view. With only one night to enjoy my apartment – not only with a view but a fridge, a sofa, an armchair, a gigantic shower and a king-size bed (ok, it’s so big it covers the light switch and plug socket that are meant to be on the side of it), it seemed a shame to waste time there by going out and seeing Poznan but I had to go out and see Poznan. According to Google Maps and the cover of the book I brought with me (“A Chip Shop in Poznan” by Ben Aitken!), there was a very decorative town square.

It was about a 20 minute walk away, during which time I discovered that you can’t go 100m without coming across the next Zabka convenience store. And then the square was dead ahead and it was stunning. It’s four sides of tall thin colourful houses, exactly the sort you’d expect in an Old Town. All less than 80 years old, of course – like much of Poland, most of this square was rebuilt after being very literally flattened in WWII – but it’s still very pretty. There’s a fountain with a mythical figure in each corner and in the middle is the most spectacular town hall I’ve ever seen.

I was hungry. Producing a loaf of bread and a packet of cheese slices on a busy train is inconvenient and I’d left them in the fridge when I came out because I didn’t want to carry everything. There were cafes under big white umbrellas everywhere and I immediately decided I wanted to rest my feet, have a cold drink and eat some chips. Finding somewhere that looked like it might do just some chips was a bit of a challenge but the answer came unexpectedly at a Mexican restaurant – although they couldn’t bring themselves to do plain plain chips (“What about salt? Yes, absolutely, as much salt as you want). I had a seat, I had shade, I had a drink, I could see two sides of the square – and I was hassled by a wasp so much that at one point I accidentally threw my (95% empty) glass down on the table at it. I can’t bring myself to squish it but if wasps just went extinct, I wouldn’t mind.

A bit more time in the square and then I went souvenir shopping. I wanted some postcards and I wanted a badge for my camp blanket with a picture of the square on it. Or, as I searched the city fruitlessly, maybe just a badge of any kind. Poznan is big on magnets but non-existent on badges. In my search, I came across a great fountain, a big shiny glass modern thing in two halves that you could walk through, great for cooling down, some frescoes on a wall, a brick castle that’s actually an art museum and like everything in Poznan except Zabka, closed on Mondays. That was enough for the afternoon. I was hot and tired and ready to come home. My train tomorrow isn’t until 4.45 so I have plenty of time to read my guidebook this evening and see what else there is to see in Poznan but if I do nothing else, I’m satisfied to have spent an afternoon in that square.

I did pop out again. I searched the station for a souvenir shop. I didn’t search the big attached shopping centre but I suspect it’s not overwhelmed with rubbish souvenir shops. But I did want to get something else to drink, partly because I don’t have much and partly in the hope of getting a 1zl piece. Standing in front of a large bottle of orange juice, mentally calculating “if I give them this note, I get this change…” to figure out if it’s going to do the magic I wanted. And it did!

You see, opposite my tower is a little park and in the park is a duckpond. And at the top of the slope leading down to the duckpond is a dispenser for duck food, only you need to put a 1zl coin in. I was a bit worried, it being gone 7pm, that the machine would be empty and I’d have got my coin for nothing but it worked! Handful of birdseed! All the pigeons in the park running to me and then all the ducks on the pond paddling at me as fast as they can. Yes, ducks. It took a moment to realise it’s an entire pond of girl ducks and not a single boy in sight. Unless they’re not mallards and a species of duck that all look like female mallards.

Ducks fed, I came home, put my big bottle of orange juice in the fridge for breakfast (there’s a Zapka right outside so I’ll get fresh bread in the morning and check out just about as late as possible) and now I’m sitting on my balcony, listening to my neighbours playing Eminem and planes coming in overhead (at least, I think they are – I have no idea where Poznan Airport is) and writing this balanced uncomfortably on my knees.