I started off with a bad impression of Wroclaw. But that is because the station is in a fairly crappy area of town. I remember this now from my teenage Interrailing exploits. Stations are in shit places and full of the transient, the mad and the homeless.

Certainly the Polish train system is a step down from Deutsche Bahn. As soon as we crossed the border and swapped trains we were made to wait for an hour in a small station with one toilet and a crappy automated Nescafe machine for company. Every train I’ve been on so far in Poland has left late and arrived late. In Germany you’re not allowed on a train without a seat booking – the train simply won’t leave if there are people standing in the corridors. The Polish train is like a British one – overcrowded, people arguing over seats, badly ventilated, smelly.

Everything feels a bit older and scruffier here than in Germany. The locals are poorly dressed, many actually quite slovenly. There’s a lot of smoking going on in the parks.

However, Wroclaw does get better as you walk towards the river. There’s a whiff of medieval in the air and the architecture that Leipzig and Dresden did not have. The river walks are actually very pleasant, the boat cruises look fun, the old churches with their narrow brick-red towers and green spires arrow up nicely into the clear blue sky. You’d never really know that this was one of the last Nazi strongholds to surrender in WW2 and that the Russian army did a good job of flattening the place.

I have been reading a book called ‘Microcosm’ that is a history of Wroclaw/Breslau since the beginning of time. Its main aim seems to be to show that the place can never legitimately be claimed as wholly German or wholly Polish, given it sits in the middle of Silesia that has been taken over at various points by Celts, Mongols, Huns, Bohemians, Hussites, Prussians etc.

And yet it does rather seem as if the Poles are keen to claim the city as much as possible. The museums are all about great Polish victories across the ages, seeing off Russians, Germans and Czechs in moments of great triumph. Saint Jadwiga is a heavy presence – another symbol of national identity. And as already mentioned, these people definitely do not dress or look or eat or drink like the Germans I’ve been mingling with these past few days.

I end the day eating a pig’s knuckle and downing two half litres of local beer. My own attire is pretty slovenly now – dirty T-shirt and shorts, a baseball hat and dusty walking boots. Perhaps I am too quickly going native.