Krakow to Budapest - another horrible train ride!

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10.08.2019. We had an horrendous day. Train 30mins late leaving Krakow, dirty carriage, filthy toilet. A change over in Bohumin down a filthy lift through a filthy tunnel, up a filthy lift to a filthy platform. This train 30mins late. 1st class ok, good comfy seats, not many in this part of the train. 2 hours out of Budapest train breaks down, in the middle of nowhere, we sit for over 30 mins and then told to get off, transfer to another train. Struggle off train on to tracks, walk across tracks, struggle onto local train, which was hot, smelly, dirty. Nobody happy. Finally we leave, train stops at every station, everyone sweating from the heat. Get into Budapest 2odd hours late, thirsty, hungry, not amused at all. We have one more train trip into Zagreb in a few days and I’m dreading it already.

These few train trips haven’t been the European rail travel that everyone raves about and to think we paid good money for first class travel! It has been suggested that Polish railways is not the best and we can attest to that! It looks like there been no effort to clean anything and as for the toilets…that’s why I put together a pamper pack to take with me because there sure ain’t any pampering on the trains! No toilet paper, no soap, no paper towels…

After finally checking into our hotel we ducked next door for a bowl of tomato soup and bread. This was about 9.15 or so and we were so hungry but didn’t want a big meal at that time of night. We did sleep, sort of, and had a late breakfast and the wandered down by the Danube to stretch out a bit and get the lay of the land.

So we’re walking along the Danube, a man asks us for directions, we don’t understand him. Next thing this guys leaps out of nowhere, brandishing police ID saying, I’m police, don’t move, don’t you go...WTF! My legs gave way I was so scared! Turns out people are trying to change money illegally in this area and he wondered if that’s what we were up to! Great intro to Budapest! We wondered if this was a scam and these two were in cahoots. We’ve now decided we won’t speak to anyone on the streets, only people in pubs, restaurants and hotels.

My blog from Krakow that I spent hours putting together seems to have disappeared. It’s been labelled as missing with a error code 404! I can’t seem to retrieve it but will start again on it later!

And there we have the past 24 hours!

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