Day 1: Home to Poznan

Tim was due to visit Poznan again this September, for the final phase of his postgraduate studies at the university. As he already had an apartment booked and flights to Poland seemed pretty cheap, I made a fairly last-minute decision to fly out with him and spend the week working remotely from Poznan.

Our journey started on Saturday morning with a Ryanair flight to Stansted at the comparatively civilised time of 12.55. It wasn't an early start by our standards and the drive down to Poznan all went smoothly, so we ended up at the airport nearly 3 hours before the flight. Stansted airport was unbelievably crowded, to the point where we only just managed to get a table in Wetherspoons. It was a good job we did manage to find somewhere to sit, because the flight ended up being delayed by around 45 minutes, so we had quite a long wait.

Flying Ryanair wasn't quite as glamourous as our last flight experience on the way home from Qatar, but it was only a short flight of around 1 hour 40 minutes to Poznan. We were greeted by a rather strict passport control; the border guard examined every stamp in our passports, which made me slightly relieved that they no longer contain Russian visas! Once we were through that we had a journey of 30 minutes or so on the airport bus into the centre of town, followed by a short walk to the apartment where we're staying.

It was nearly 6pm by this point so we were arriving a bit later than we'd planned to be, but luckily it was self check-in so we were able to retrieve our keys from a lockbox with no problems. The apartment is nice and comfortable...

...plus has a desk where I can do some work during the week.

We're on the 5th floor, so have got some nice views out over Poznan too.

Conscious that it was soon going to start getting dark, we did a bit of unpacking and then went outside for a stroll around.

There's a very pretty square not far from where we're staying.

The main statue is of Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish writer after whom the university here is named.

The buildings behind are part of the university.

The other monument is to the victims of protests which took place in Poznan in 1956.

In the background you can see more modern buildings near the train station.

We were quite hungry by this point so went to a nearby restaurant where we've eaten before and had a lovely meal of goulash with dumplings

Then it was time for an early night because we needed to be up on time in the morning to catch a train to Wrocław.