Accidentally arriving in Slovakia

Having adopted a small English PE teacher, who we'll call Gash Hunter, we head to the station in Krakow with the intention of getting on the 13:30 to Budapest. With time to spare we stand in the information queue for 30 minutes and ask for tickets to Budapest. She tells us there's a direct train to Budapest at 22:30. We again ask for tickets on the 13:30 that changes once. She tells us it doesn't exist that there's a 13:35 that changes twice. Sounds like a plan. We now have to queue in another queue to get tickets.

After 45 minutes.... and roughly an hour and a half in the station to get one ticket, we get to the woman and she shouts at us, telling us that the train was 13:30 and not 13:35. It's 13:31, so we've missed the train. we're told to go back to the information desk and decide what train we're getting. Why do we think there is a 13:35 etc.

We've now missed the train to budapest. So we go in search of the internet to inquire with Deutsche Bahn as to how we can get out of Krakow and poland today without waiting till 22:30 for a 9 hour night train to Budapest.

Our luck is in, there;'s a train to Zilina in slovakia thats 2 hours and 5 changes away, at least we can sleep in a new country tonight..... cos Poland's starting to get on my wick....

With only minutes to spare, we manage to negotiate a ticket to Zilina.

It's clear as soon as we start on this train, that we are not on a tourist backpacker train to the next capital city. It's a very quiet and run down train and it's travelling at about 20km an hour. We make our first change, and get onto a slower more rural train. .....

By our third train, we have no idea if we are in Slovakia, Poland or Czech Republic, which is quite a strange experience. To get from platform to plat form you just walk along the train track:

==Walking along the train tracks.

Eventually we arrive in Zilina. We have phoned one of the cheaper hotels in the city, because the place doesn't seem to have youth hostels. We have a tripple room booked, we just need to find the hotel.

When we walk out of the station, a man starts talking to us in Slovakian. He's really friendly, but doesn't seem to understand that we don't understand slovakian. I get the phrase book out and tell him that we are scottish and that we are scottish and don't understand slovakian, he understands so speaks to us a little slower.

We make our excuses with body language as best we can, and head towards the centre of town. It's a really nice little town:





Our hotel is just off the main square. We check in and apprehensively head to our room. I know from my hotel experience, that you can never tell the state of the room by the state of the reception. It looked nice enough.

We get in the room and it looks very nice. Clean... Comfy.... we go into the toilet and discover a heart shaped jacuzzi. We're laughing and joking about landing lucky(It's between 15 and 20 euros a night each), when one of discovers that the cupboard is not a cupboard, but an en suite sauna.



In all my traveling for meetings and conferences, I have never been in a hotel with an en suite sauna......

There's further hilarity when luke and I discover a mirror above our double bed.

We head out to try and get something to eat, it's now after 9pm, and our luck seems to be out. We settle for a couple of pints of fresh Staropramen that cost less than 0.50 euros each:



We enjoy the luxury of the hotel room, and sleep late, once we're up and showered, we head to the only lonely planet point of interest... zilina has a castle.

We walk back down to the square where Tesco is and get a view over the town:



We follow the road along the river, and eventually we can see the castle. The river is huge:





We get a photo of us crossing the train lines. It's still alien to us:





From here, there's a nice view over the city:



It's strange, there's a peaceful country feel to it, with a motorway running through the middle and a dilapidated ex communist industrialism to the whole place.

After a few wrong turns, we eventually make it to the castle:



They don't make much of it, and we seem to have more video footage than camera footage. We get a guided tour of the place in Slovakian... which is pretty bizarre, but it's quite cool knowing that there won't have been many scotsmen through here.

After the castle, we take a walk along the river. We're not long into our trip, but it's good to escape the bustle of Krakow for somewhere a little more rural:





From there, it's back to the centre for some food, beer and then sleep.

Tomorrow we are heading for Eger in Hungary as a stop off point for getting to Romania.... it;s the home of Bull's Blood. A potent red wine.