We chose Łódź (pronounced Woodge) to visit as it was said to have good street art and interesting architecture, all of which could be done as a day trip from Warsaw. Our pre-booked bus tickets on FlixBus worked great and two hours of uneventful bus ride later we exited into a large modern bus/train station, quite close to downtown.
And a few minutes later we found ourselves on Piotrkowska street, the 4km heart of the city.
There was a lot of construction going on, including the main roundabout by plac Wolności which made navigating the sidewalks a little tricky in places. We did find some gems though like this mural by Roa (one of my favorite street artists) and Rosa’s Passage, an alleyway where the buildings are covered in broken glass mosaics.
The Wooden Church (Ogrodowa 22) was a nice hidden bit, it’s too bad we couldn’t get in and see the stained glass windows properly.
The Manufaktura area reminded us of the America Tobacco Campus here in Durham. It was much bigger than we expected with a Ferris wheel, water feature with neon flamingos, and lots of shops and restaurants.
For lunch we went traditional at Galicya. We were seated in the basement near a window and enjoyed a tasty meal of pierogies (potato and cheese “Russian” for Eric and meat for me) with a dark porter each.
We walked off some of our lunch taking in a few more murals on the west side of town.
Around 3pm it started raining so we stopped for a torte at Cafe Levante. Eric let me have one bite! And apparently everyone else had the same idea because I went in to get waters and came back to find Eric surrounded by a patio full of smokers. Boo.
I got a notification on my phone that our bus was going to be 45 minutes late, so we walked over to Jabeerwocky for a pint to get out of the rain. Eric had an Imperial sour, and in the absence of any dark beer choices, I got a light sour IPA. We nursed our beers for an hour then walked back to the train station to wait for our bus back to Warsaw.
Final thoughts – the street art was okay but not nearly as impressive as some other cities we’ve visited, and is really spread out. I had marked all these murals on the map not realizing some were over a mile away from the city center! We really got our steps in – thankfully before the rain hit.
While it was interesting to see another city in Poland it was a long time (4+ hours RT) to go for a small payoff.