We continued with our walk, and decided to experience the Eastern European Department Store. No longer do these have lots of barren shelves, followed by a job lot of tractor parts and lots of cakes. You can get just about everything you might want, especially tights, and shoes. Our legs were aching, so we retreated to the Spiz Brewery to try the remaining beers that we hadn’t tried the day before. These were the Weizenbeer – which I usually like, unlike Gazza – but not this one. It had an odd taste to it, which wasn’t quite right. We then had the normal light (Jesne) beer and finally the strong (mocne) beer. Bear in mind that the beer here is strong anyway, so if it’s mocne it’s going to be really strong! Gents beware, there is a Putz Frau in the toilets, if you’re female (or lucky like Neil – she was on her break) you can get away without paying.

After the beer, it was time for food & this time we went to a Greek restaurant on Rynek, where Neil had stuffed aubergine & I had 4 cheese pizza plus a beer each for under a tenner. The waiter spoke good English and they had an English menu. It was quite amusing, as there were some Polish businessmen in entertaining some Japanese guests, they had bought a bottle of Finlandia vodka which was in a wine cooler with lots of ice & this kept being poured out with lots of toasting going on. I wondered what the Japanese made of it all.

So now we were well stuffed, it was time for more beer, so we decided to try Rejs bar again. There were still no goths, but there were quite a few people in – mainly chain smoking students. The pub seems to have its own Rejs beer but we don’t know who it was brewed by, as no one spoke English, though I suspect it came from the Carlsberg owned brewery in the town. There was a small dog at the bar on a stool who insisted on being stroked by whoever was near – he didn’t care that we couldn’t speak Polish. Quite a few people left, leaving only the barflies and us. Neil decided that they were like the characters in the Simpsons, so we spent some time working out which was Barney.

After this it was back to Academus for another beer, before we discovered we were out of money and decided to go back to the hotel.

On the Tuesday we woke up to find it was snowing. We were due to meet up with a Polish friend at about 3.30, so we decided to spend the morning sight seeing. We visited the Radowice Panorama which is a painting of a battle against the Russians that the Poles won in the 18th Century, although they lost the war as a whole. This seemed to sum up the Polish way – celebrating the little victories whilst everything on the whole is going tits up! Still it was quite interesting, and after that we decided it was probably time for more beer.

One of the recommendations we found was Piwosz, which was claimed to be like Prague’s Pivni Galerie, but in Poland, be warned, it isn’t. It does have a lot of Polish beers available and Belgian beers, but it doesn’t have a sit down area where you can try them – it’s basically a Polish off licence. Worth going to if you want to sit in your hotel room & drink, or if you are over in the summer & want to go & sit in a park & have a cold beer. We bought a few bottles to bring back with us, but as we were doing it hand luggage only, we couldn’t get many. The street name is also incorrect in the recommendation, it should be Ul Stefana Zeromskiego, not Zerumski.

Drink Markt Piwniak at ul.Szwedzka 15b and Piwoszek on Dworcova 4 are similar – we didn’t go in as we had enough beer to carry, but we did walk past them both. These are both on the way to the train station, so if people are combining trains and beer they are probably better to visit than Piwosz which is to the north of the city and quite out of the way.

Following our visit to Piwosz we dropped our beer supplies back at the hotel and went out to meet Marcin. He took us to a bar frequented by Polish people called Mleczarnia, it’s run by a guy from Kracow, and apparently has a Kracowian atmosphere. It was quite a cool place, very dark with candles on the tables and seemed to have a choice of beers in bottles or on draft. We had the draft beer, which was the local usual brew. Oh the website is in Polish, so it’s pretty meaningless unless you’ve got a translator.

There followed a fairly pointless wander around to find somewhere to eat, before we ended up in a pretty dodgy restaurant called … which was one step up from MuckDonalds, though I thought the pizzas we had were okay, the burgers & kebabs that others were having were accompanied by Mac-chip style fries which looked pretty anaemic. After this we found a cellar bar club called Fuzon, which is supposed to play punk and alternative. It started off quite well with some Polish punky stuff, but soon degenerated into western electronica, when it got to Depeche Mode it was time to call it a night & go back to the hotel. The beer was called Warka, and was a pilsner style beer, there was also bottled beer, but we didn’t stay long enough to check it out. Some lads opposite were getting pretty hammered on it though, and you could also buy beer by the jug.

All in all, I’m not sure that there is enough to do in Wroclaw to spend too long there especially in the winter, it’s was quite good for a few days, and would be a good stopping off point on the way around Poland taking in a few other towns. It’s also close to Prague, and within easy reach of Berlin so you could make time to have a trip over before returning to more of a beer paradise!  

 

Rynek with bird!	Neil in Spiz	Rynek
Wroclaw	Wroclaw	Wroclaw