Day 2: Wrocław

Tim didn't have any study commitments on Sunday, so we'd planned an excursion to the city of Wrocław. We briefly visited Wrocław in 2009, on the way back from attending the World Esperanto Congress in Białystok. When I say briefly, I mean that, having spent a week in Białystok, we were flying back to the UK from Wrocław airport. If you know anything about the geography of Poland then you'll know that Wrocław is not a terribly convenient place to fly back from when you've just spent a week in Białystok, and we had a 12-hour Polish rail adventure in order to get there. All went well until, changing trains in Poznan, we got confused about which platform we were supposed to be on and boarded a train which, while it was going to Wrocław, wasn't the train that we'd booked on. Ironically, we had more expensive tickets for an intercity train but had accidentally boarded a slower (and cheaper) regional train. The Polish ticket inspector who came to check our tickets wasn't impressed by this, making us buy additional tickets for the regional train anyway. A very nice man in our carriage who spoke some English tried to help us out, taking us around various ticket counters in Wrocław station afterwards and attempting to negotiate a refund for us. It didn't work out and we saw very little of Wrocław beyond the train station and the airport.

I was hopeful that today's experience was going to be more positive! Wrocław is around 90 minutes away from Poznan by train and I'd bought today's tickets in advance via an app. We managed to get on the correct train in Poznan station today, avoiding any awkward encounters with ticket inspectors, and by 11am we had arrived at Wrocław Central Station.

I didn't remember the train station being such a grand building! First impressions of Wrocław were very positive as we set off towards the town centre.

It was a really hot day - over 30 degrees - and but we walked through a shady park for a while, which was nice.

Shortly afterwards we reached Wrocław's main square.

Wow. I hadn't done a lot of research before coming here so I wasn't sure what to expect, but this was really beautiful.

The most impressive building in the square is Wrocław Town Hall.

It was originally built in the 13th century, though has been expanded many times since then.

Like most of the square it survived the Second World War with comparatively minor damage and has now been successfully restored.

The rest of the square is huge and there are so many colourful buildings.

Our photos are helped by the fact that it was a sunny day with a bright blue sky, but I think it would look cheerful here even in bad weather.

We strolled around all sides of the square admiring the buildings, before going inside for an iced coffee to cool off.

There were some particularly ornate buildings towards the far end of the square...

...and we also discovered St Elizabeth's Church, which has a very bright chequered roof.

Walking a bit further we found another old town square.

The buildings in this one were just as beautiful.

Eventually we came back round in a circle past the town hall again.

It was impressive from this side too.

We found a restaurant in the square to get a drink...

...and some lunch.

After lunch we walked a bit further through the town...

...until we came to the river Oder, which runs through the city.

There we found Wrocław Cathedral, which is situated on a small island in the river.

A church was first built here in the 10th century, although the current cathedral is the fourth version to be built on this site.

At this point we had about an hour until our train back to Poznan and one more sight we wanted to visit: Plac Ludwika Zamenhof. We can't add this Zamenhof street to our list of spontaneous Esperanto finds; we'd searched the map earlier on the off-chance that there might be a Zamenhof Street, as there are quite a few in Poland. We walked around 2km to this one and found... that it wasn't terribly impressive!

It was a small grassy park, without even a proper sign. The best we could find was this list of the park rules, which does confirm in small print near the top that this is Plac Ludwika Zamenhof.

Oh well, never mind! We'd had a great day in Wrocław regardless; definitely more successful than our 2009 trip