A Week in Poland, Part 1 : Wrocław

This week I’ve been in Poland – for the first half of the week I spoke at SQLDay in Wrocław, and now I’m doing some tooling around the country. This was some fantastic isolated rain we saw on the drive from Warsaw to Wrocław:

Walking around Wrocław was exhausting, but I got to see some great sites – mostly churches. I started out in the Ostrów Tumski area:

On this island I came across displays showing photographs of the devastation of the area from 1945. I tried to take side-by-side shots of roughly the same shots today:

I saw some weird churches (well, weird to me, anyway).

I tried to go to Aula Leopoldina, which is a great church housed inside the main University, but as luck would have it, it is closed on Wednesdays, and that is the only day I had. So I took pictures of the doors and of the 17th Meridian, which passes right through the building:

At right is Wrocław’s town hall at night. During the conference we went down to the central square area for meals or drinks, including a fantastic multi-course meal at Dwór Polski – featuring the strongest vodka I’ve ever tasted, and the first time I’ve been brave enough to put steak tartare anywhere near my mouth.

On our last night in Wrocław, we ate at Piwnica Swidnicka, the disputed oldest restaurant in Europe (founded in 1273, which is quite a bit younger than Salzburg’s Stiftskeller, claiming to date back to 803). Whether it is the oldest or not, we had a fantastic meal – onion soup like none I’ve ever tasted, followed by wild boar with roasted potatoes and delicious beets, and finally a shot of rocket fuel vodka poured very carefully from a 3-foot glass musket.

A few other random shots from around Wrocław: