Wroclaw, part I

The first thing to know about Wroclaw is that if you pronounce it the Anglo way you will become a laughing stock. I learnt this the hard way. According to google it's pronounced "Vro-tz-wav" which I just kept forgetting for some reason. I kept calling it "Row-clorr." I can't count the amount of blank stares I got when telling people in Katowice that I was going to "Ro-clorr," which would usually then give way to "Oh, you mean VRO-TZ-WAFF/V." Vera told me it was pronounced Vro-tz-luv, and you pronounce the last syllable the same way you do "love." Oh, well. Close enough for the East Asian whose native tongue is weird and tonal.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I arrived at the Dworzec (that's the Polish word for main bus station) at about nine-ish. The directions to the hostel were fairly simple to follow - walk straight, turn right, walk straight again - but it still took me a good thirty minutes to get there.

This is a picture of my last meal in Katowice, by the way, which I forgot to include in my last entry so might as well put it here. The last entry was too gloomy, and I didn't want to put pictures of food there either.

When I arrived at the hostel I was completely knackered. Check in was uneventful - a rather haggard looking boy carrying a guitar came in the same time I did, and asked if there were any available beds in a decidedly southern English accent. I looked at him, he might have looked back at me, and I took my keys and left.

Communal area in the hostel and a tranny Marilyn Monroe.

Walked into the room which, to my surprise, was practically empty. It was an ten-person room, quite large and airy, not one of those sardine tin hostel rooms. There were only two guests there, who introduced themselves as Will and Vera. Will was from Australia and Vera was from Belarus, and both of them were undergrad students in Wroclaw, though not at the same universities. I said hi, we all introduced ourselves (although they'd obviously already been talking before I came in) and we waded through the formalities - where we were from, what we were doing in Wroclaw etc etc. I told them about my visit to Auschwitz and how it was weighing heavily on my mind. Since they had both visited the concentration camps previously, we had quite a bit to talk about. Somewhere in the middle of this the haggard boy from the reception came in and introduced himself as Jake.

I went off to shower and inspected a cut on my foot which had somehow gotten infected, horror of horrors (I obviously don't carry iodine around with me), and had swollen considerably and was incredibly uncomfortable to walk on. I went back, noticed that Jake and Vera had disappeared, and asked Will what he knew about wound infection and whether I was going to get gangrene. Will assured me that I wasn't going to be losing limbs any time soon, and we sat down and talked. It was so nice, being able to speak proper English again rather than gesturing wildly and speaking slowly - "whip-laaaaash," says Pietro. Hands down my favourite mutant of the Xmen movies, including Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult and the incomparable James McAvoy.

Jake and Vera came back pretty late, and Jake strummed away on his guitar while Will and I talked on the lower bunks; Vera was skyping with her mother on the upper bunk. It was a rather magical night, the sort that I try to find every time I travel. Everything seemed so right: having such a large room for such a minimum amount of people, which was a lovely change, no smelly backpackers, no weird older people, no sullen people huddled away on their bunks, no snorers. That and the fact that we were all the same age range and shared common interests. And on top of that, I got TWO POWER SOCKETS AND A NIGHT LIGHT to myself.

Next morning, I went upstairs to the kitchen where there was a coffee machine of all things, and made myself a nice cup of coffee. Jake came up soon after, and then Will, and I put away my tablet and we talked a bit more. Jake went off to busk, and Will introduced me to this restaurant which had been open since the Soviet era and was dirt cheap. Food did not look particularly appetising but was surprisingly tasty.

Mashed potatoes, mysterious meat and pink goulash. Tasted 1000x better than it actually looks.

The restaurant.

Walked around the old town, which was right next to the hostel, so very good location. The old town was breathtakingly beautiful. That's one of the reasons I like Poland so much; it's relatively unknown to tourists, which is reflected by the people who stay in their hostels (have yet to meet anyone from the US, for one..!), very much underrated, incredibly cheap, and takes your breath away. Everywhere you look is an Instagram-worthy picture. Still one of my favourite countries in Europe, and definitely beats some of the overrated and well known European cities such as Paris and Copenhagen. On the one hand I want more people to know about Poland, but on the other I don't want it overrun with tourists and becoming commercialised.

The old city hall.

And the pretty pastel-coloured Flemish-like buildings which I'd seen in Gdansk - another favourite city of mine. Poland never fails to astonish. I've still got Warsaw and Krakow left on my bucket list.

Startling beautiful - I've come to expect this of Poland and yet it never fails to amaze me.

More to come soon. I'm on a roll.