Blogs from Lower Silesian, Poland, Europe - page 4

Sunday, June 11 – after breakfast at Hotel Fortuna, we had a walking tour of old town Kraków. We had a very passionate and knowledgeable young guide, Alicja. We started at St. Florian’s Gate (the only remaining gate), where a small part of the adjoining wall still stands, dating back to the 1300s. In the 19th century, the moat was filled in and made into a park - a green ring all around the old city, measuring about 4 km. Kraków has a long and storied history dating back to the 900s. We saw the Rynek Główny (main square), which dates to the 13th century and is the biggest open square in Europe. We saw the remaining tower from the town hall, St. Mary's church, which was built in the 14th century by the people of ... read more

Et nous voici en Pologne ! mon 65èm pays... et pour cette année ce n'est pas fini... on en ajoutera encore quelques uns ! (surprise !) Nous entrons donc en Pologne, tout près de la frontière de la Tchequie, sans y passer toutefois, car nous avons déjà eu l'occasion de visiter Prague... La ville que nous visons est Wroclaw (prononcez Vroclav...). Et bien nous en a pris car c'est vraiment une très belle ville que beaucoup de touristes ignorent ! Pour y arriver nous passerons encore en Allemange un tunnel... puis très vite arrive la frontière sans contrôle bien entendu puisque la Pologne fait partie de l'Europe mais n'utilise pas l'euro... qu'on vous accepte tout de même et le calcul est facile car on divise les prix par 4... Nous nous arrêtons au premier parking car ... read more

Winter travels in Eastern Europe – Dear Friends in Wroclaw, Poland We drove our car 3,300 km from Minsk, Belarus where we are teaching to see the cities, Christmas markets and quiet snow covered countryside of Belarus, Poland, Czech Republic and eastern Germany. We ended our trip in Wroclaw, Poland (pronounced Vrotslav) and spent two nights with good friends Andrey and Ola. Their new apartment is cozy with a great view of the city skyline. (We stayed with them twice when they lived in Vilnius.) They cook good meals and taught us to play a game called Lines that helps people understand how difficult it was to get goods in soviet times. Ola went with us on a Free Walking Tour of the old town. It was freezing! But such a beautiful old town and many ... read more

A Night at the Opera. At one point in history, this would have been a Bohemian Rhapsody. Wroclaw is disputed territory. It has changed hands through history, passing only most recently back under Polish protection in 1945. The city, the dominant place in Lower Silesia, was once known as Vratislava, under Bohemian rule. By 1526, the Austro-Hungarian empire was back in charge and the city became known as Breslau. The King of Prussia then intervened and took over in 1741. Napoleon arrived for a while as a liberator - perhaps an alternative theory why the concept of the dwarf is popular - before Breslau grew into the 2nd city of Prussia after Berlin. At the point of German unification, the city was the 3rd largest in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. It is now the 4thlargest ... read more

Wroclaw Zoo is a zoo located in the City of Wroclaw in Southern Poland. The Zoo is a very large zoo and has recently undergone lots of development projects such as the Afrykarium. I really liked this zoo and if you count Afrykarium as one single exhibit than it is the best one I have ever seen. - As I just wrote, the Afrykarium is fantastic and is the best single exhibit I have ever seen. The building is huge and grand on the outside and inside including two fantastic pools for a fair sized group of cape fur seals and a huge group of African penguins (sharing with cape shelducks) but make their enclosures seem empty. There are lots of big tanks with freshwater and saltwater fish including a huge tank for sharks, rays, a ... read more