Salzburg, Austria → Krakow, Poland 2/5/10

What a bitch of a journey. To get here we bought tickets for Krakow from Salzburg with a changeover in Vienna. The first ride to Vienna was perfectly fine for the 2 hours that it took. The 9 hour ride from Vienna to Krakow was something else entirely. We found the train alright, but the only car labeled for Krakow was a sleeping car that we didn’t have reservations for. The reason we couldn’t just hop on any of the cars is because the trains in Europe disconnect various cars at certain stops and reconnect them to other trains heading in that direction. So started one of the most stressful times of my life. After presenting our tickets to the Russian conductor, he immediately pointed down the line of trailing cars attached to the train. We had a good 20 minutes before the train was to leave so we were fine time-wise. However every other car’s final destination was something else entirely (Warsaw, Prague, Berlin to name a few), or the conductor of the other train would send us back to the Krakow car. It didn’t help that the conductor of the Krakow car would only speak to us in fucking Sputnik and send us out because “the car is full.” This merry-go-round of passing from car to car was pissing everyone off to no end, especially after doors were locked behind us so we couldn’t return to various cars that we had just been in, or conductors like the Russian one would grab or push us (this happened to Katie S. and Laurel) so that we’d get off. They just didn’t care to help at all.

We finally settled on one of the cars labeled “Warsawa” figuring that one of the conductors who would check our tickets over the journey would be able to tell us when to switch cars so that we’d head toward Krakow. The conductors we asked in the beginning said the ride was fine and Christina and Katie S. sat with a guy from the Czech Republic who was a translator and believed that we were heading in the right direction. Hearing him speak English in the next compartment over was surprisingly comforting after the fucking musical chairs experience with the conductors that we’d had. His reassurance was really all we had to go on, but we hung on to it.

I slept from 11 PM to 12:30 AM taking the first shift while Lauren stayed awake (our group had divided ourselves into 3 two person groups for compartments so that no one would be alone with strangers). When I woke up we had apparently been at Brěclav for about 30 minutes before pulling out of the station and then pulling back in so that the cops could come abroad for some reason. Short of Lawrence of Arabia blowing up the tracks I didn’t know what was going on at this time.

I realized looking at my ticket later that morning that the stop we were at, Katowice, was the last stop listed before Krakow. I can only assume that this is where things went wrong what with us being in the wrong train car. Eagerly anticipating the arrival after 11 hours on trains, we waited for the Krakow station that was confirmed by our conductors at the last ticket check. As we entered the station, though, the sign read not “Krakow” but “Warsawa?” FUCK!! It was at this point that I wanted to start Red Dawn all over again. This is also pretty much my Amazing Race moment where we miss a crucial flight or in this case are in a completely different city. Cue commercial break…

Warsaw is north of Krakow and we felt it. It was ass-cold there, so much so that we didn’t even venture outside while we tried to rectify the situation. If there was ever an experience or a city that could turn me off from Eastern Europe, this would be it. We figured out that we had to pay around 25 €, on top of the 128 € we had already paid for the round trip tickets, in order to take an intercity train from Warsaw to Krakow. Well at least now we were for sure heading for Krakow.