Hi, I'm Nataliia. ☕

The best way to understand someone is to know what they do on a Saturday morning. Mine almost always involves walking somewhere in Poznań, ordering a flat white, and spending however long I want just being somewhere nice.

I've lived here for three years now. Long enough to have a mental map of every café worth sitting in, strong opinions about which streets are worth walking slowly, and a genuine feeling that this city is mine. Poznań surprised me when I arrived — it's quieter than Warsaw but not in a boring way. More like a place that's completely comfortable with itself.

That's my neighbourhood. I walk that street almost every Saturday morning, usually on the way to a café, never in a rush. The light hits those buildings in a way that still catches me off guard after three years. I think that's a good sign — it means I haven't stopped noticing.

When I first moved here, I did what I always do in a new city: mapped every café worth visiting. Not on Google Maps — in my head. An internal list of where the espresso is right and where the sofa by the window is always free. It took about three weeks. I was very motivated.

Wanda became a regular pretty quickly. A summer terrace, good coffee, the kind of outdoor setup where you can sit for two hours and nobody looks at you like you've overstayed your welcome. The menu has something called a "Wanda latte" and I have tried to resist ordering it every single time and failed every single time.

Coffee, for me, has never just been about the drink. It's the whole ritual — choosing where to go, walking there, sitting with something in your hands and nowhere urgent to be. I've had some of my best ideas over a second coffee I definitely didn't need. There's something about that unhurried state that makes everything clearer.

I did not plan for the cheesecake. I never do. That's the thing about café mornings — you go in for a coffee and then the pastry case makes a very compelling argument and suddenly you're forty minutes in with a fork in your hand and no regrets whatsoever. The cheesecake was very good, by the way. Obviously.

Sometimes the café is wherever you're already walking. I have a real weakness for the takeaway coffee as a concept — it gives you something to hold and a reason to be outside, which is sometimes all you need. That cup has something written on it in Polish that translates roughly to "swap texting for meeting up." Very pointed. I was alone. I kept walking.

This was taken at a place with flowers on every table and enormous windows looking onto the street. The kind of café that makes you feel like you're inside a painting. I sat there for two hours. I ordered a second coffee I did not need. I would do it again immediately.

That meringue is from a café where everything on the menu looked exactly like this — too beautiful to eat, too good not to. I've made peace with the fact that I'm the kind of person who photographs dessert before eating it. It takes about four seconds and I stand by it completely.

Not every café morning is precious and curated. Some are a rainy Tuesday at somewhere familiar because you need somewhere warm to sit and think. That counts too. What I like about coffee culture is that it has room for all of it — the slow Saturday flat white and the emergency americano in the rain.

Also, rain in Poznań is genuinely quite nice sometimes. The city gets quieter. The café gets cozier. I have no complaints.

He sat like this for about twenty minutes. I still don't know what he wanted. Probably just to be observed. Cat-sitting is, honestly, one of my favourite things — there's a cat, the cat wants food, you provide food, and then you sit on the sofa together and nobody needs to say anything. The best kind of company.

I took that photo from a pier. The water was so clear you could see the bottom ten metres down. There were fish. I just stood there for a while. No thoughts, no agenda. Just the water and the light and the very specific sound the Adriatic makes when it hits stone.

Finding a café that's actually on the water — tables-over-the-sea on the water — is one of those things I actively search for every trip. This one had a railing and the Adriatic right below it. I ordered a latte, put on my sunglasses, and felt extremely at peace with every decision I had ever made.

Barcaffè is everywhere on the Croatian coast — Italian-influenced, small cups, fast and serious, usually at a little counter or a tiny table with the sea somewhere nearby. It's a completely different coffee experience from what I drink in Poznań. I love both for completely different reasons. Coffee tastes like where you are.

The rule is: if you're in an old town in Croatia and you see a gelateria, you stop. It doesn't matter if you just ate. It doesn't matter if it's 10am. You stop, you choose carefully, you walk and eat and look at the church tower and feel like you're doing exactly the right thing.

I've walked through a lot of Croatian old towns now. They're all different — Dubrovnik is dramatic, Split is alive, Zadar is quietly beautiful — but they all have this. Narrow stone streets, flags overhead, the sound of your own footsteps echoing off walls that have been there for centuries. I never want to leave any of them.

Loquat trees. I had never seen one before Croatia. Now I look for them every time. There's something about that particular shade of orange-yellow against a completely blue sky that I find genuinely joyful — the kind of small, specific pleasure you only notice when you're moving slowly and paying attention. Croatia taught me to move more slowly.

This pizza was excellent. The column next to it was approximately 2,000 years old and had been incorporated into the restaurant wall as if that were completely normal. Nobody around me seemed particularly amazed. I was amazed enough for the whole table.