Spring break part 6: More transit though Poland

Before we left Przemyśl we spent some time in the bus station using their computer to try and figure out our next 4 days. We still needed some way to get back to Helsinki, so we went ahead and booked Ryanair flights from Prague to Finland via Frankfurt. So now we had some kind of a solid plan: we had to be in Prague on Sunday. Counting backwards from Sunday, we realized it would be totally impossible to do the Ukraine and Romania like we had been planning. That was a bummer, considering those were some of the places we were most excited to go. We figured if we could get to Kraków Poland by that night, we could take an overnight train into Hungary, and then hit up Slovakia and the Czech Republic before we had to fly out. We went to the train station to get tickets to Kraków and through a lot of pointing and gesturing, the ticket salesman told us that the train we needed left the platform in 2 minutes. He didn't sell us tickets or anything, he just told us to ran to catch the train. So there we are, running through the station in Poland, jumping on some unknown train without tickets as it's pulling away.
 I was really worried about the lack of ticket thing, since at least in Finland it's a huge deal if you get on a bus or train without them. I immediately started walking up and down the cars looking for the conductor and waving around a fistful of money so it wouldn't look like we were trying to get away with anything. When the conductor did finally come around, he was very nice (in the Polish way), and we easily paid and got tickets. We even asked him when we would be arriving (without using words of course) and he went and looked it up and came back a little while later with the time written on a piece of paper. Oh, those Poles....

Party on our private berth (or maybe it was just that no one else wanted to sit with us) on the train through Poland:

This one was really great, but unfortunately I only caught the end of it. It's a dance remix of Johnny Cash's Walk the Line. 

 

To hear the complete song, click HERE. And I highly recommend you do that. It's pretty epic. And possibly the most random thing you could ever hear on the Polish radio. Make sure you get at least 2 minutes into it before you give up. That's the point where the hook really gets ya. I'm kind of obsessed with it now. 

A nuclear plant

There were lots of Playmobil people in Poland

We got to Kraków at 11:30 at night, and luckily, there was a very helpful English speaker at the train station to help us figure out our next leg. It turned out that there was an overnight train into Hungary, but it took 12 hours, and if we did that we would be spending about 4 hours in Hungary before we would have to take another overnight train into Slovakia, spend a few hours there, and finally a third overnight train to Prague. While that would be possible, it sounded less than ideal. So we decided to scratch those two as well, stay in Kraków for the night (which was supposed to be a pretty awesome place in and of itself), and then just spend some quality time in the Czech Republic. We went ahead and got a ticket for the next morning to Olomouc, which was described in Lonely Planet as, "The Czech Republic's most under-rated destination." Sounds good to me.

Due to our less than 9 hours spent in Kraków, we unfortunately saw little more than the Sushi restaurant full of American high schoolers (described in more detail in "Eating Eastern Europe") and our hostel. It was quite a culture shock though to get off the train and have gone from this:

To this:

I don't really understand why, but somehow the train drops you off at this huge mall that you have to go through to get to the actual train station. It was quite bizarre. Although I must admit, we did stop in H&M for one hot minute.

Our snazzy hostel

Even though we didn't see much of it, Kraków seemed like a nice place (though, on that night at least, rather overrun with drunk youngsters). I'd like to make a return visit.