Day 0 - Discovering Lower Silesia 🇵🇱 - Wroclaw

We landed in Wrocław at midday. They picked us up at the airport, dropped us at the hotel, we ate there, and at five in the afternoon Bartek was waiting downstairs with the bikes to show us the city.

It came to thirteen kilometres in a little over two hours, and half of those two hours we spent standing still. Which is exactly what a guided bike tour is: you are not going anywhere, you are going to look.

We started at the Rynek, the market square, with the Gothic town hall planted in the middle of it. It is one of the largest medieval squares in Europe, and the odd thing is that it is not empty: there is a whole block of buildings inside it. Narrow coloured houses, every one of them different, and enough people sitting outside to tell you straight away how this city lives.

That was where we started spotting dwarfs. They are everywhere: on the pavements, clinging to lampposts, climbing up façades. There are more than a thousand of them around the city and they are not a decoration for tourists. They come from the Orange Alternative, a movement from the eighties that protested against the communist regime through sheer absurdity: when the police covered up graffiti against the government with blobs of paint, they went out and painted a dwarf on top of every blob. The first bronze one was put up in 2001 so that nobody would forget. Now people walk around the city hunting for them like a treasure hunt.

We carried on to the church of St Mary Magdalene, which has a walkway strung between its two towers, and from there we crossed east past the Panorama Racławicka, a circular painting more than a hundred metres long housed in a building put up specifically to hold it.

The stop that impressed me most was the Hala Stulecia, the Centennial Hall. It is a reinforced concrete pavilion that opened in 1913, the work of Max Berg, with a dome sixty five metres across that at the time was the largest concrete dome in the world, bigger than the Pantheon in Rome. They built it in two years. It has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 2006 and it was the first building from the 20th century in Poland to make the list. Next to it there is an enormous fountain and a Japanese garden, and we spent a good while there.

We came back across the Oder and rode into Ostrów Tumski, the oldest part of Wrocław, the cathedral island. This is where you find out that the city has something no other city in Poland has: nearly a hundred gas lamps that are still lit by hand, one by one, every night. A real lamplighter does it, in a top hat and a cape with the city's coat of arms, carrying a pole two and a half metres long. In summer he goes out on his round after nine. We rode through two hours before that, with the sun still high, so we missed him. Noted for next time.

From there to the covered market, the Wyspa Słodowa island and the university, and back to the Rynek to close the loop. We had dinner at the Restauracja Wrocławska.

What I took away from the first day was not a monument, it was a general impression: in Wrocław the bike is not an outing, it is transport. Properly built lanes, people of every age moving around on bikes at seven in the evening, and no sense at all of fighting with cars. The next day we would ride out of the city towards the mountains and find out that this was not a capital city thing, it was a thing across the whole region.