Picture this – we’re sitting in my room late one evening armed with our laptops and various flight booking websites, trying to compete with each other on who could get the cheapest flight to somewhere in Europe. What was the result? We booked tickets to Wrocław, Poland for £45 return. Finally, for three days I can be one of those people who you see posting travel pictures mid-term on Instagram whilst you’re mindlessly scrolling through your feed.

I had no idea what to expect from Poland, only that it would be a little colder than the UK (despite Wroclaw bragging to be the warmest city in Poland). I remember our walking tour guide on one of the days: “if only you were here last week, there were blue skies…” But, the weather didn’t stop us! It kind of reminded me of British weather to be honest and we were all nicely wrapped up, so it meant the cold wasn’t too much of a bother!

We crammed a lot into the three days, so I’m gonna give you three things I remember from our trip:

1. Find a walking tour, but don’t be afraid of leaving half way through

I’ve found walking tours are a little hit and miss. I love it when our tour guide tells us anecdotes and tries to joke with us, but the one we found told us a ‘little’ too many facts. We ditched him 1/4 of the way through, leaving to take cute pictures of the town and explore at our own leisure. (This makes us sound bad, but we do appreciate culture… I promise.)

2. They have a lot of dwarfs.

Trying to pose with the dwarfs

Now I still don’t understand why there’s a whole bunch of dwarfs scattered across the cities, but there’s an abundance of cute little dwarfs in different poses. We decided to take the quest of hunting them all down, until we found out there were over 300 (omg). We found out that restaurants can pay to have their own dwarf outside their restaurant to reel in tourists. Pretty good marketing plan eh? Grab the tourists when they come near.

3. Wroclaw’s architecture

Overlooking Wroclaw

My favourite part of the architecture was seeing the figures of common-folk carved into the buildings who used to live many years ago. There was one of a guy drunk and a woman holding a slipper up ready to hit him which was was carved into the side of a HUGE building. There are also numerous bridges and small ‘islands’ to walk over which made Wroclaw quite a unique location to explore.

Overall, I think the trip was a success as we had the opportunity to try Polish food and I managed to gather another map for my small but growing map collection. It was great to take a much needed breather from university for a weekend, everything had seemed to be really chaotic recently and travelling has given me a sense of relief. I now feel refreshed and ready to take on the next bulk of my dissertation for the next four weeks!

p.s. check out these blogs for Wroclaw from the perspective of my fellow travel-mates:

Georgie – https://alifeofalanguagestudent.com/2017/03/17/wroclaw-in-48-hours/

Karmen – http://www.rookieexperiences.com/2017/03/14/re-evening-wroclaw/