Those Eastern European trains again...!

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Another very 'trainy' day, as we moved onto our last city of the holiday, Krakow. We had to be up painfully early at 5am to check out at half five and get to the station in time for our 6:30am train to Warsaw. Walking to the S-Bahn, we passed a fair few drunken stragglers returning from an obviously good night out (Newcastle might have its own reputation for being a party city, but it's rare you'll find that on a Thursday night/Friday morning so I think Berlin beats us!) but other than that, the streets were deserted. As I said in a previous blog, one very good thing about Berlin (and Germany in general) is that the trains are very regular and almost always dead on time, so even at that time in the morning we stil got straight on and were at the Hauptbahnhof for 5:45am. We got a smoothie for breakfast and some sandwiches to eat on the train before going to the platform, where our train was....delayed. Yep, that'll teach me for being so impressed! It was only by fifteen minutes, which wasn't really too bad, although I was a bit gutted as that probably meant we were cutting it fine to see a bit of Warsaw before catching our connection through to Krakow.

We had a very interesting family in our compartment this time; there were parents, two young children and a baby, and almost immediately on setting off, the mother started breastfeeding right in John's eyeline (he was shocked to his core, haha). She then proceeded to change the baby's very smelly and dirty nappy on the seat next to John, which I have to admit I would have found hilarious if it wasn't quite so rank lol. The parents also kept scoring with eachother, which was inappropriate enough in front of us, but in front of their kids as well...? It was just downright wrong! They also kept giving us funny looks, which we thought might be because they thought WE were setting bad examples to their kids. Their children had big cases with what looked like expensive musical instruments in them and were busying themselves playing Sudoku, while John and I had our DS and PSP out and were clearly trying really hard not to swear from the tension of our games lol...but if you ask me, the kids looked quite envious and wished they were playing them as well! The family eventually left about halfway through the trip in Pogorze and were replaced by an old couple who were much less interesting (but also much less terrifying for John!) and the rest of the six hour journey passed without incident. When we arrived at Warsaw station though, things were a lot less relaxing! It took us a while to manouver our way out of the giant underground tunnel to the main station, and when we did and checked the board for our next train...it wasn't there! We had reservations on this train (which despite our rail passes, we'd still had to pay £60 for!) and so we weren't overly impressed to find that it may not actually exist. We went to the information desk to enquire, but there wasn't anyone there with what you would call a decent grasp of English (which is fair enough, seeing as we were in Poland, but it still would have been helpful if there had been lol), and so we just spoke to a woman who looked over our tickets, appeared very confused and then eventually declared that we should just get the 2:11pm train to Krakow, and that that was 'probably' our train. Hmmmmm. Anyway, after all that, we definitely didn't have time to get out and see Warsaw so we headed into the shopping centre attached to the station to use the loo, and then back into the station...and that was all we saw of the capital! Oh well. When we made it to the platform (back through the mysterious underground tunnels), we had no idea where to stand because the platform was divided into eight sectors, all with different trains arriving to them and with no signs saying which train was going where. We were a bit freaked, but there were at least a lot of backpackers standing around also looking very confused so we did know it wasn't just us! An announcement was then made that made every polish person on the platform groan (again, worrying), so John found a polish lady to ask, who luckily spoke English and advised us that the train was running twenty minutes late...which was annoying, but at least not as bad as we'd feared on hearing that groan! We decided to keep our eye on the woman, and when a few minutes later she moved to a different sector of the platform, we followed. And that was a good plan, because it wasn't too long later when our train showed up there!

We were in a smoking compartment for this trip, which we had been dreading, but sadly polish trains don't have too many non-smoking areas and they were all booked up by the time we were able to get our reservations. It wasn't too bad at first, but then it got too cold and we had to close the windows, at which point everyone suddenly started lighting up. We amused ourselves by watching the couple in front of us though, who were from Sweden and looked to be embarking on a similar trip to us...except they were at the start rather than the end. They were both quite bulky, and in a small compartment, they took up quite a lot of room. And the young lad sitting next to them was all squashed in and kept falling asleep...with nowhere to put his head when he did fall asleep but on the swedish bloke's shoulder. Oh dear. The swedish man did not react well to this, and kept angrily jerking and practically punching the lad in the head to get him to move...which was a bit harsh to be honest, because he was asleep! He didn't know what he was doing! Fair enough, it's not the most comfortable of situations to be in, but this bloke really overreacted. Me and John were in pain from trying to hold in the laughter watching it all though, lol. Anyway, eventually they left to find the buffet carriage (I assume...yes, I'm a bitch!), which was a shame because the whole thing was massively entertaining. With about an hour of the journey left, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and an announcement was made in polish. We asked the guy next to John what was happening, and he told us that there was a problem with some new rail tracks that were being put down for Euro 2012 and they'd spread over to our track...so we had to wait til they were cleared (which was an interesting enough reason for being delayed, I suppose!). John ended up chatting to this guy all the way there, after discovering that he had lived in England for a while and his favourite footballer was Alan Shearer. He agreed to become an official Newcastle fan, and also taught John all about polish cheeses (along with the young lad in front who had now woken up and despite not speaking a word of English seemed greatly amused by the conversation), so when we eventually got moving, the journey sped by. Eventually, we made it to Krakow at 5:40pm.

For some reason, even though we hadn't been looking forward to Krakow the most of all the cities we were visiting, we were insanely excited when we got off the train and kept just repeating "We're in Poland, we're in Poland!". We even took a photo of me in the square outside the station, now forever known as the "We're in Poland!" shot...maybe we were just a bit stir crazy after spending almost twelve hours of the day cooped up on trains? Anyway, we made our way to the Hotel Kazimierz (unsurprisingly, it's in the Kazimierz area of the city!) which was easy enough, though a bit of a trek. It was a very nice place in a very nice area of the city, which was...ummm, nice, though we didn't stay long as we were starving and needed to get out for some tea. We walked past Wawel Hill and down Kanonica Street (which was pretty, but the two words to describe it best are really 'old' and 'crumbly'!), and then straight down to Rynek Glowny, the main market square. It was a very impressive, very beautiful place and absolutely huge. A dance group was performing in the middle, there was classical music playing and just a happy atmosphere around that you couldn't help but be sucked in by. We had a look around and then eventually settled on a touristy Italian place for tea, because (as usual) I was craving pizza. The service was awful, but the food was really nice so it wasn't a bad choice, and then we got some ice cream on Grodzka, one of the side streets. Unsurprisingly, we were feeling completely exhausted so even though we desperately wanted to stay and keep walking around, we knew the sensible thing to do was go back to the hotel and get some rest for a big day the next day. A shame really, because when we got back to Kazimierz, it was just starting to get busy with clubbers and it would have been fun to walk around and take in more of the atmosphere.

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