1. Wrocław has its own international airport and so is easy to get to.
2. Take the 106 bus from the airport (the fare is about 70p), the last stop being in Centrum (Centre) near the main rail station.
3. The last stop turned out to be even nearer to my hotel, the Ibis Styles. Centrum seems a good location as it is roughly halfway between the venue (Sports Club AZS) and Rynek (Market Square) in Stare Miasto (Old Town).
4. I strongly recommend getting a room with airconditioning. The weather was not particularly hot during my stay. There was lots of cloud and quite a bit of rain, but it was still sultry.
5. The chess festival is very popular with juniors and with young people in general.
6. Mask-wearing is followed fairly strictly on public transport and especially in supermarkets (by customers, rather than staff), but not in most other shops or elsewhere. I saw no one at the chess festival wearing a mask, except for one player in the first-day rapid.
7. Announcements at the festival are only in Polish.
8. Polish prices are very low compared with the UK - an espresso in a smart cafe is about £1.55, and a half-litre of upmarket beer in a bar is about £1.95. Supermarket prices seem, if anything, even cheaper compared with Britain.
9. The Old Town has masses of restaurants, which also serve as bars. However the rest of the city has very few local bars of the type typically found in neighbouring countries such as Germany and Czechia or, for that matter, in Britain. However, the lazy pub-crawler should check out a street called Świdnicka, which is crossed by railtracks. Under the arches are 18 bars side-by-side, interrupted only by a sex shop (closed whenever I visited) and a cosmetic salon (also shut).
10. Getting a covid antigen test before my return flight was easy. I just turned up at a clinic at Powstańców Śląskich 60 (no appointment necessary), paid about £31 for the test, and returned an hour later to collect my certificate.
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