Torun

Torun, Poland is well known for a few things.  The astronomer Copernicus lived there and it has a nice historic district that was largely untouched by World War 2.  I arrived in Torun after a 2 hour bus ride from Gdansk & found a luggage locker for my bag & headed into town for a short visit.

The town has many churches & almost all were red brick & primarily gothic style buildings.  I noticed a lot of older people dressed up walking down the main pedestrian street which seemed strange at 10:00 am on a weekday.  When I got to the main square in town, there was some type of march going on & then some type of religious ceremony.  I never did find out exactly what it was.

I stopped at a place on the main square for lunch, visited the Copernicus museum, & took a few more photos before heading back to catch the bus to Warsaw.

Copernicus statue

The main walking street in Torun

The bus ride back to Warsaw was 3.5 hours & it was about another 45 minutes on public transit to my hotel.  I stayed in an IBIS hotel for one night before my morning flight to Budapest.  Just as I was l leaving to get a sandwich from a place down the street, an alarm goes off in the building.  I saw the receptionist on the phone outside saying it was a false alarm.  Then a few minutes later, 3 fire trucks pull up at the hotel with some loud recorded message throughout the building in several languages saying stay where you are & don't panic. I am glad it was just a false alarm, but it went on for about 15 minutes since no one seemed to know how to turn it off.

Well after the excitement of the false alarm, it was time to get some rest since I had a 10:30 am flight in the morning.  I will be in Budapest for 12 nights, so it will be a nice break to be in one place for awhile after staying in 8 cities over the last month.