Beautiful Wroclaw

With all this scurrying about Europe we are of course now a bit behind in our blog writing.... oops.

But there are so many better things to be doing than sitting at a laptop, like exploring the beautiful city of Wroclaw for example:

We crossed into Poland and Wroclaw was our first stop. I had marked it as a place I wanted to visit when we first got our stack of guidebooks months ago. By the time we were in the area, I'd forgotten why I had been interested in going there, but convinced Liam that it was a good idea, because, when have I ever had a harebrained idea that didn't turn out to be excellent?

Good thing we did too, as Wroclaw is a super lively student town. We showed up on a Wednesday expecting not much, and found a bustling town square full of people, buskers playing, excellent bars and restaurants, and lots of cute buildings.

One fun element is that the city has a tradition of placing gnomes in the urban landscape. Originally made to commemorate the Polish anti-communist movement "Orange Alternative" (their logo was a gnome), these little guys are now all over the city and are a tourist attraction. You can get a map and go gnome-hunting - there are over 300!

We used our lunch stop as a chance to catch up on some overdue post... if you received a letter from us, this is where it came from!

(Stuffing and sealing that many envelopes is easy with coffee, crepes and a great salad)

Wroclaw reminds me a little bit of Copenhagen, with its rows of cheerful apartment buildings overlooking the squares. On this particular square, they have a 24 hour flower-stall, which I thought was a lovely, if random, idea. Liam however thought it was an incredibly good business plan - the middle of the night is exactly the time when apology flowers are likely to be bought!!

​​​​We also visited the Wroclaw panorama, which is a HUGE 114m wide continuous painting of a great Polish battle, housed in a large round building. The walls are curved up an around precisely so that the perspective is spot-on, and you feel as though you are in the painting. In front of the canvas, artists have created a kind of diorama, using soil, tufts of grass, broken carriages and other elements from the painting, so that you can't see where the painting ends and reality begins.

I especially like the way they created the fences out of branches - standing in front of them, I knew where the "real" fence ended and the painting began, but they were so well merged to be almost seamless.

After super filling dinner of ribs and vegetables (the food is so cheap here compared to Denmark!) , we wandered back to take the tram to our campsite, passing an on-the-pavement book sale in the dark... Poland is cool.