InPost and the strange geography of home

The first time I noticed InPost in Barcelona, it was not a parcel locker.

It was a Punto Pack sign outside a local tabac, squeezed between signs for cigarettes and Catalan lottery tickets. The yellow logo was instantly familiar, even though the setting was not. I took a photograph, naturally.

In Poland, InPost is so ordinary that it has almost disappeared into the landscape. Parcel lockers stand beside supermarkets, blocks of flats, petrol stations and shopping centres. You order something, receive a code and collect it whenever it suits you. Nobody waits at home for a courier unless they absolutely have to.

Outside Poland, however, the same yellow logo becomes strangely noticeable.

Later, I spotted a full-sized locker beside a Repsol station near Caldes de Montbui. It stood there casually, somewhere between the road and the surrounding Catalan landscape, looking both completely normal and slightly out of place.

I photographed that one too.

Then there was Madrid.

Inside an underground car park near the Fountain of Neptune, I found another InPost locker. This one had a message printed across its doors:

From Poland with love.

It was an unexpectedly emotional slogan for a metal box designed to store parcels, but I understood it immediately.

At that point, the lockers were still something I noticed rather than something I used. Small pieces of familiar infrastructure appearing during journeys through Spain. A Polish company quietly making itself at home in petrol stations, shops and underground car parks.

Then I placed an online order and chose collection instead of home delivery.

Delivery to my door would not even have cost extra. I simply did not feel like arranging my day around a Spanish courier, wondering whether the telephone would ring, whether I would understand the instructions or whether I would return home to find some unhelpful notification informing me that the parcel had gone somewhere else.

The collection point was at Mercat de Sant Antoni, close enough to fit easily into my normal route. I could pick up the parcel on my way to the gym and continue with the rest of the day.

Only after the order had been dispatched did I notice who was delivering it.

Paquete admitido por InPost.

The yellow lockers I had been photographing across Spain were no longer roadside curiosities. One of them was now holding my parcel in Barcelona.

There was only one problem: I could not find it.

In Poland, parcel lockers usually stand outside. That was the mental map I carried with me when I arrived at the market. I walked around at street level, looking for the familiar yellow structure somewhere near an entrance or pavement.

Nothing.

After a brief investigation online, I discovered that the locker was inside the underground car park beneath Mercat de Sant Antoni. The comments suggested that I was not the first person to search for it above ground.

So I went back.

Finding the correct entrance was only the beginning. The locker was not waiting conveniently beside the stairs. I had to walk through the entire car park, past rows of cars and other collection machines, until InPost finally appeared at the far end.

There it was: white and yellow, hidden underground, with the same message I had already seen in Madrid.

From Poland with love.

The whole experience was both familiar and completely different. The process was recognisable: enter the code, open the compartment, take the parcel. The geography was not.

Perhaps this is what happens when everyday systems travel. They remain recognisable but adapt to the places in which they arrive. In Poland, the parcel locker usually lives outside. In Barcelona, it may be concealed beneath a nineteenth-century market, at the end of a car park, beside an Amazon Hub.

The idea is the same. The route to it is not.

That small difference probably explains why I feel more affection for InPost in Spain than I ever did in Poland. At home, it is simply practical. Abroad, it is practical and familiar.

Living between countries changes the things that can make you homesick. It is not always food, language or family traditions. Sometimes it is a particular shop. Sometimes it is a system that works exactly as you expect. Sometimes it is the sight of a yellow logo in a place where you were not expecting to find it.

A parcel locker is not a romantic object. It is not supposed to carry memories or produce nostalgia.

And yet, after photographing InPost in Barcelona, Caldes de Montbui and Madrid, I finally collected my own parcel from one hidden underneath Mercat de Sant Antoni.

The company’s slogan was right after all.

It really had come from Poland with love.