It is a bit embarrassing, but it took us almost all of our 6 nights in Wroclaw to learn how to correctly pronounce it. Polish is a bit challenging… “VROT-swahf”. Wroclaw is our 3rd sizeable Polish city we have visited with over 1 million people in the metro area. On this trip, we are missing Warsaw, but we heard so many good things about Wroclaw, that we chose it as our last location in Poland even though we can barely pronounce it. It is another Polish city with an incredibly beautiful town square that rivals any in Europe.
Wroclaw is famous for it’s bronze gnomes that are only a few inches tall. It started out as a protest against Soviet control but there are now over 1000 of them and they are really just for fun. They are placed all over the city to show different aspects of Wroclaw culture, activities and business. We saw singing gnomes, reading gnomes, SUP paddling gnomes and also gnomes tied to businesses like the barber gnome outside the hair salon and the typography gnome outside the old printing press. It seemed like there was at least one on each block so walking through town became a bit more interesting.
The first day we heard that there was going to be a Gnome parade and festival downtown, and we got really excited. We love these sort of cultural surprises when visiting new cities. We headed to the main square to see what it was all about. We found a couple hundred kids with gnome hats being entertained by some clowns and dancing to kids music. The parade was going to be the kids walking around the square cheered on by their parents. Not exactly what we are hoping for, but it was entertaining for a few minutes.
We have been to many many “free” walking tours all over the world. We always learn something but sometimes they are not the best. Some guides don’t have the charm or charisma to make the historical and cultural facts interesting…. and we have been a part of a few of those tours lately. So, we decided to try something else in Wroclaw and skipped the “free” walking tour. Instead, we used the Questo app on our phone to follow a self directed puzzle/scavenger hunt around the town. We still went to the same places as the regular walking tours, but we hoped to learn the cultural and historical facts on the app while having some fun with the puzzles. It was kind of interesting but the puzzles and the facts were not enough for us. We learned a bit but we weren’t really entertained. Some of the puzzles just asked us “What year was the statue created?”. I think we will return to our walking tours in the next town.
Wroclaw is town with a lot of canals and bridges and we were able to see a lot of those along with some impressive churches and other architecture.
We did of course visit some museums during our time in Wroclaw. We saw the National Gallery with art and some historical pieces but what was unique in Wroclaw was the Ractawice Panorama museum. It was a 360 degree huge painting of a 1794 battle. They built a rotunda just for one painting and let around 100 people in every 30 minutes to view it while they narrated how the battle happened, and why it is important for the Polish people. It is not our favorite genre of painting but we are very glad we went to see this one of a kind attraction.
One day, we took a day train trip to the smaller town of Klodsko. One of our problems in “seeing the world” is that we often just stay in the major tourist cities so are making a sincere effort to go see the smaller towns that aren’t 100% catering to tourists. Klodsko is a cute little town that must have been very important centuries ago. It has an old fortress on the hill, a couple of impressive churches and an old town hall. The main street had a few restored buildings and we sat in the small square for lunch watching the Polish townspeople do their normal small town stuff. We went to the local historical museum which was all in Polish so we didn’t really learn much about Klodsko but we learned enough to make some guesses. I think there was a clock factory here in the 18th and 19th century and a glass art school here in the 20th century. The museum also had some cool brick tunnels underneath that showed life in the medieval times. The best part of Klodsko was seeing just seeing some historical stuff without the onslaught of tourists that we have seen in the bigger Polish towns. It was really cool just to have a quiet day in a beautiful small Polish town. We spent a couple of hours in the square eating ice cream and having a spritz while we waited for the train back to Wroclaw.
We are now getting ready to leave Poland. In our first trip here we have seen several towns, but as always, there is much more to see. That will have to wait for a different trip. We have really enjoyed what we have been able to see and we will definitely be back some day. Now, we are heading to a new place for me, but Meg has already been there…. Prague in the Czech Republic.