The Japanes Garden in Wrocaw (10 pictures)

On our last day in Wrocaw (Sunday June 24th) we went to the Japanese Garden in Wrocław.  The park was prepared for the 1913 World's Fair.

There isn't a lot of info about the garden other than that one fact that I could come across online, so this post will mostly be made up of pictures.

Wandering around Wrocław (19 pictures)

Wrocław is a city with an interesting background.  At various times in the past it has been part of Poland, Bohemia, Prussia, Germany, and the Austrian Empire.  The city is built on both sides of the River Oder, as well as on some islands in the river.  It is known for a large number of bridges.

Under German rule, the city was known as Breslau and it was a stronghold of the Nazi's during the war, with the city's population of 10,000 Jews being nearly entirely wiped out.  Speaking Polish in public was made a crime and there were nearly 10,000 Allied prisoners and 51,000 slave laborers (mostly Polish) based around the city in forced labor camps. 

The city was besieged by the Soviets towards the end of World War II and nearly half of it was destroyed.  In August 1945 the city had a German population of 189,500, and a Polish population of 17,000.  Almost all of the German inhabitants fled or were forcibly expelled between 1945 and 1949 and were settled in Allied Occupation Zones in Germany.

Now the city is becoming fairly international again, with large presences by companies like IBM, HP, Google, 3M, Microsoft, and a large number of other firms as well (such as Siemens, SAP, Cargill, and Dolby Labs to name a few).  It's not the hotbed for young people that Warsaw and Krakow are, but it's probably 3rd on the list. 

I rode down from Poznań in my friend Paweł's car with his wife Iga gracing us with her presence (thank you again Iga for letting me take the passenger seat).  :)

Once we got to the city we met up with our friend Kryz and spent the rest of that Saturday and the first half of Sunday wandering around.

The picture below is of the Sky Tower (either currently, or recently was the largest residential tower in the EU, although it only partially residential) looking down a canal.

If Snow White lived in Wrocław, she would hang out with a lot more than 7 Dwarves...... (28 pictures)

My weekends for a while have been a bit bonkers as I prepare for my move back to the United States.  It's hard to believe it's now only 2 weeks away.  So I decided I need to catch up on some of blog posts I haven't gotten around to.

First up are a couple of posts from my trip to Wrocław (that's sort of "vrots-wav" to my non-Polish-speaking readers from my non-Polish-speaking self) with my friends Paweł and Iga Macko, to see our friend Kryz Ptak who moved there after he left Franklin.

Wrocław was a very neat city that I liked a lot.  But I'll start off first with the Dwarves of Wrocław.  Or Krasnale, as I believe they called in Polish.  There are around 250 of them in the city, mostly in near the city center, and each one is unique.  Not just every emplacement, but every dwarf throughout the city is unique.

There aren't prominent signs or anything pointing them out.  They are just present.  Sometimes just on the sidewalk near a building, statue, or fountain.  Sometimes on a ledge outside a shop.  So you have to keep an eye out for them.

Their placement is strictly controlled by city hall and you have to petition to have one placed.  What's cool is that all of them have been created and placed just since 2009.

Anyway, the rest of this post is just pictures of the dwarves.  The next post on Wrocław will show pictures of the rest of the city and a bit about what we did.

Have a great day!