Arriving in Poznan
We got to Poznan on the Warsawa Express from Berlin, where we had arrived the previous day to attend the opening reception of our friend Lisa Fong's exhibition. The trainride went smooth and was uneventful and we arrived at Poznan Glowny at 3:30pm.
I wanted to buy our tickets to Wroclaw in advance so we got in line at one of the ticket desks that sold Regional tickets. Queuing is something you have to learn to deal with in Poland, because, as we found out later, any means is good to get in front of you. When it finally was our turn, I asked the guy if he spoke English. He shook his head and waved us away, but I had come prepared. I had written down what we needed in Polish, so I just showed him the paper. He looked at it and with a lot of sighing and groaning, fed the info into the computer, wrote down the price and then produced our ticket.
We walked out of the train station and concluded it was not a pretty sight to behold. But then most area's around train stations are dumps, wherever you are in the world. We spotted our hotel, the Novotel Poznan Centrum, in the back, a tall concrete and glass building, and figured we might just as well walk there.
The weather was nice, so we set off on a 15 minute walk along a busy road and the bus station, found the underpass to get to the other side of the road and then spent another 15 minutes looking for the entrance of the hotel. A sign would have been nice.
Hotel staff spoke English and we checked in without any problems. After freshening up a bit, we left again, anxious to see the city.
We had dinner at Pizza Hut, because we were hungry and didn't feel like hunting down some authentic restaurant. We'd do that later. We had promised ourselves we were going to try the local cuisine on this trip, so we were definately going to have Polish at one point. But not today.
After dinner, we walked around some more and then retreated to the hotel for a good night's sleep.
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It is however a business hotel and as such it is kind of cold and inpersonal.
The rooms are large and well, just about perfect. Nice large bathrooms, comfy beds, water cooker and overpriced mini bar. The usual.
Outside of the convention season, the hotel caters to tour groups. You will hardly notice them as they get their own space for breakfast. This however means that you have to walk for about a mile to a large hall, where breakfast is served for individual travelers.
Breakfast is Amazing. I am using a capital A here because it deserves it. You will not miss a single thing here.
We booked this hotel through booking.com at about 70 Euro per night.
