historic town hall
How do you say thank you in Polish? I asked two students who were sitting next to us. ‘Dziekuje’, but don’t use that word cause we rarely say ‘thank you’ in Poland.".
Indeed, in Poznan we didn’t hear ‘dziekuje’ (Later in Krakow we heard this word many times). We have arrived in an Eastern Europe country. The train station was old and not appealing. We searched for a left luggage and found an office. There were four men chatting. None of them speaks English nor German, so we had to explain ourselves with hands and feet. Fortunately there was a tourist office in the station. We got a brief explanation and a city map. The city centre is about 15 minutes walking from the station, and there’s not much to see on the way there. But when you arrive in the centre you’d know why this city is the second most beautiful city of Poland.
city square
Especially the main square (Stary Rynek) is stunning with it’s beautiful historic town hall in the middle, surrounded by coloured houses. We’ll come back here later to dine. We walked to the cathedral, about another 15 minutes. It’s worthed to go to the cathedral (Ostrów Tumski). But it’s a pity that the cathedral and the Church of Our Lady are the only nice buildings in it’s surrounding. In Holland we’d say “These buildings have had their best time”, now it looks like a ghetto. To bad, cause there’s so many potential for this area to regain it’s lost glory.
We had dinner in the city square and went to a mall. This mall was big and luxurious, we didn’t expect to see this is Poznan. Our train would leave at 11.40 p.m. so we waited on the platform. Suddenly a man who slept behind us woke up and walked to the station building then he smacked on the ground just in front of us… he was drunk… He stood up and continued his journey to the wall and urinated. The urine streamed in our direction… Okay, we were prepared to see many drunk in Poland, but not this. So we went inside the building and got ourselves a cup of thee at Kentucky Fried Chicken!! We stayed here ‘till the train comes.
Arch-Cathedral Basilica St Peter and St Paul from the back side
The train came. It was a long train and we couldn’t see the wagon numbers. So finally we decided to go in and search inside. Not a wise decision cause inside it was crowded, some also searching their places. It was difficult to walk with our backpacks through them, and none speaks English. Finally we saw a conductor. She didn’t understand English and didn’t understand the ticket as it was bought in Germany. With our hands we made the sleeping gesture and she understood. We followed her through many wagons to the head conductor. He opens the locked door between the sitting wagons an the sleeping wagons and another conductor helped us to find our compartment. Sleep tight
Berlin - Poznan is 3 hours by train. We left Berlin at 12:29 and arrived in Poznan at 15:32. We left Poznan at 23:40 with the night train heading to Krakow
