I've been writing about my travels in Eastern Europe in the last couple of days, which has caused me to reminisce over some of the places I visited, from the very good (Riga, Latvia and Zakopane, Poland - surely the two most underrated cities on the planet) to the very bad, which as you may have guessed, is what I'd like to expand on here. To be fair, we travelled through 30 towns and cities and only two stand out as being truly terrible: Haparanda, a small town in Northern Sweden that felt like the checkpoint for the edge of the earth - constantly in dusk and swamped in silence, punctuated only by the cacklings of a deranged elderly resident. Truly unforgettable.
Haparanda had an excuse though - it never advertised itself as being more than a quiet backwater to stop off at en route further North. The other member of the 'terrible two' is a city with 800,000 residents and is the second largest in Poland. Its name is Lodz, its name is pronounced Woodge, and it has to be seen to be believed. The most remarkable thing about Lodz is that is has close to a million residents, and there is only one street of any interest. Happily enough, it was the only street that felt remotely safe. Turning off Ulica Piotrkowska in any direction seemed to lead into a confrontation with an inebriated local, or being saved from a mauling by a rabid alsation only by a perilously weak chainmail fence. Ulica Piotrkowska was reasonably busy, well-lit and had a cosmopolitan air - every other street in Lodz seemed to be dim, forbidding and laced with shattered glass. It's the only place in Lodz anyone wants to be, which may explain the inspiration for today's fact:
Ulica Piotrknowska is the longest commercial street in Europe.
It is 5km long, which does not seem especially long, but a quick Google suggests that it is the only place staking a claim for the crown - maybe other cities with a bit more to offer aren't crowing loud enough, but I'm happy to unofficially award them the prize - God knows they need it. OK, maybe I'm being too harsh - I'd hate to come across as a snobbish tourist, even though I almost certainly will do, given that I've given over two whole paragraphs to slagging one place off. Lodz may well be a perfectly nice place to live, and I know it's had economic problems (this information was passed to us by residents of Wroclaw, once they'd recovered their jaws on hearing that we'd actually visited the place), but it just wasn't very touristy. It seems odd that so many other, admittedly nicer, Polish cities, cater for a constant influx of tourists (and not just Krakow - Poznan, Gdansk and plenty of other smaller cities), whereas I feel like we might've been the only British people to have ever visited Poland's second city. Let's keep it that way.
Interestingly, the longest street in the world is generally recognised to be Yonge Street in Canada - it runs continuously for an astonishing 1,178 miles - comfortably further than the length of the entire U.K, and marginally further than we walked trying to find a restaurant in Lodz. A recent South Park episode mockingly suggested that there are about three roads in all of Canada - judging by this statistic, this might be closer to the truth than I thought.
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