For a week in June, my friend Taylor and I traveled from Berlin to Wrocław to Warsaw, and met up with another friend, Hanna. Will be writing more on Wrocław in the next post!
Camera: Olympus XA
Lens: Olympus F-Zuiko 35mm 1:2.8
Film: Fujifilm Superia X-Tra 400
Wrocław
We took a 5-hour bus ride between Berlin and Wrocław. Originally we had planned to take the train but the tickets never arrived on time and day-of I recieved an email from Deutsche Bahn saying my connection had been lost. Oh well. Bus was just fine.
We arrived in Wrocław late in the afternoon, took very quick showers at the deceptively sketchy-looking BnB (did I mention it was hot the whole week?) and then met Hanna outside the apartment. I’m not sure how to describe seeing a person that you had not seen in years, except that it was so good to feel immediately like nothing had changed and that I knew her again right away.
We walked to the city center, very close to the apartment, and around a springtime market. Hanna pointed out the little dwarfs everywhere, a small sample of over 350 of them scattered around the city. For atmosphere, I immediately enjoyed the narrow kind-of-German-style kind-of-something-else buildings, the narrow streets, and the cobble stones. We went to a basement restaurant to try local banana beer and eat dinner – pierogi and placki (dumplings and potato pancakes). Following dinner, we walked along the river and across a few of the many bridges in the historic center of the city, where we were told on one of the islands there are still real gas lamps with a real lamplighter that makes his rounds lighting them every night. Alas, we got caught up sitting outside a bar having beer and dessert so we did not get to see him in person.
At first impression, I immediately found Wrocław extremely romantic and charming. There was a coziness about it that I liked right away. The city is filled with parks and green spaces, and everything feels very close to the branches of the Oder River. Hanna said she liked it because the city is so close to nature, and even though we stayed mostly towards the historic center, I could understand. Even the soviet-style apartment buildings have a sense of charm to me in that they appeared more ornate than those that we saw in Berlin, more obscured by greenery and less-so with graffiti (which I know, is a kind of aesthetic, but it’s maybe just not the aesthetic for me). Roadways are narrow, cobblestoned, and winding, criss-crossed with narrow trams and filled with people walking, bicyclists, and scooters.
The following day we planned to ascend to the top of a church to get a view of the city. Breakfast prior was sweet crepes. I was surprised to find many menus in the city were written more than one language, sometimes in four – Polish, English, Russian, and German. It’s a surviving quirk to a country that has been under the control of a handful of contrasting empires over the centuries. For us, communicating was no difficulty, although I always tried to ask if someone spoke English before speaking it. “Czy mowisz po angielsku?” “Yeah what would you like to order?”
We walked a few blocks through the city to a church and paid a small fee to climb the stairs to the top. It was 20-something flights going in circles all the way. After a long climb up (and a few breaks in the middle) we were able to view Wrocław from the center looking down. The city is the 3rd largest in Poland, although Poland has comparatively small cities. You couldn’t quite get a grasp of the size of this one just by looking at it though – there is so much greenery that it obscures any understanding of how far the buildings spread. Other church towers dot the landscape, the tallest buildings amongst the rest. Hanna explained that it is a very religious country – on the streets we frequently saw nuns and priests in full habit going on their way.
After a dizzyingly steep and narrow climb down, we walked further through the city to a museum which houses a giant panorama painting, stopping briefly for coffee at a hidden garden cafe. The tours at the museum were full for the day, so we purchased tickets for the next day and made our way over towards the zoo to it and have a beer at a beach bar in the hot afternoon. Nearby we walked over to a Japanese garden, where we spent a short time caught in the rain, saw part of a lighted fountain show, and then returned to city center to try and catch a jazz show. Unfortunately, the jazz bar near our apartment happened to be having a Polish comedy night, and the other was sold out. So we sat outdoors and had another drink in the evening, making plans to meet early to travel out to Zamek Książ (Castle Książ) in the morning.
Zamek Książ was one of my favorite things of this entire trip – more photos to come in the next post.
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