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Published: February 22nd 2012
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Continuing my quest to visit every place worth going to within a 500 kilometre radius of my temporary hometown of Prague, I went to the lively, university town of Wroclaw (Vrot-slaf) in South Western Poland at the weekend. This fairly small city is renowned for it nice architecture and student vibe.
Compared to many cities in Central Europe, Wroclaw should be pretty close to Prague but it isn’t when you get the longest local bus in existence. A 250 kilometre journey took us over five-hours thanks to a bus that stopped at every town, village and tree to pick up old ladies with their shopping, families with dogs and escaped convicts to then deposit them in the next hamlet two-miles down the road. On a nearly empty bus my friend and I suffered repeatedly from those awkward moments where you’re having loud conversations along the lines of ‘if you had to shag an animal which one would you choose’ before realising that all the people in front of you can speak perfect English.
I am by nature a reserved person. Think of the classic Englishman complete with bad teeth but without any of the suave and sophistication. So when
I go on holiday I normally put the emphasis on the sightseeing and to a lesser extent the culture. Hardcore partying takes a back seat. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely drink (like a typically unskilled Englishman that doesn’t listen to his limits) and do my fair share of bar-hopping but due to my lack of social skills/shyness I won’t end up naked in a sauna at 6am with a group of local girls or in a prison cell doing tequila slammers with the city police.
So a messy weekend in Wroclaw in Poland was a welcome change. I left the missus/ball and chain/old lady/trouble and strife/significant other at home and took my flatmate James – a guy who has a few talents I lack, including a total immunity to embarrassment, absolutely no self-censor, a total free reign on the ‘shit chat’ part of his brain and about half a metre extra height. This is a guy who within an hour of being in Poland had got into a shouting fight with a Polish shop-owner after urinating over the back of his shop and then walked around for the weekend with plastic bags tied around his feet to keep
them dry. The entire weekend was spent with him playfully harassing every girl he could find with the line “Are you from Poland? ...Where is good to party? ...Can you come with us?” And, to be fair to him, it worked. We ended up being taken to many excellent bars by lovely people to drink cheap, good beer. In its compact city centre, Wroclaw boasts a huge amount of clubs, beer cellars, micro-breweries, bars, traditional pubs and possibly the cheapest English pub in Europe.
My Polish friend always bangs on about the Poles being very friendly and the being women amazingly attractive but he’s Polish so I usually take it with a pinch of salt. Mythbuster: the Poles are very friendly and amazingly attractive. It was a nice change from the Czechs who are lovely when you get to know them but in public have hearts of stone. Wroclaw is a really youthful city that’s full of students so this probably counted in its favour and I might just be generalising a little.
To be honest, drinking and being hungover were two of the only real choices open to us. Wroclaw as an actual tourist destination is attractive enough but not spectacular. It’s a pleasant historical town with a charming town centre made up of multi-colour houses and more churches than you can count. We arrived after snow had been falling for a couple of weeks and the temperature was still a couple of degrees below zero which left most of the river completely frozen over. It’s the kind of scene that needs the maximum self-control not to do a running jump and face-plant on the ice and I don’t think I have never been so jealous of a duck. Unfortunately the sky was completely grey which made all the admittedly fine buildings seem very depressing indeed and our photos turned out far from impressive. There was no point walking around for anymore than an hour or two as even Rome or Star Wars’ Cloud City would look fairly unspectacular in the unrelenting greyness. We must go back in the Spring.
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