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.

Exploring Krakow and Auschwitz.....

We decided last night that we woul spend the mornign exploring Krakow by Daylight.... because there is a tour of Auschwitz which leaves the Hostel at 13:00... We hummed and hawed all last night as to whetehr we wanted to go to Auschwitz or not... eventually we decided to go... based on the fact that it was a huge part of History, and if either of us returned to Krakow, we may not be with people that wanted/were willing to go.....

First up though is Krakow by day.... what's immediattly clear is that despite the lack of road and huge roadworks which surround the station, this is a really touristy city.... There a re seas and seas of people.... We got some photos of the main square by daylight - hopefully I can uload these shortly.... then we headed down to Wawel Castle.

Krakow used to be the Capital of Poland, so the King would be in residence here. He had a huge impressive castle which sits on a hill just south of the city and beside Kazimierz which is the Jewish District where Spielberg shot Schindlers list.

We walk up and around the castle and get a view across the Industrial south of Krakow.. which is full of High rises and the standard skylines you expect in ex-communist countries. Once we get round the the inner courtyard of the castle, it's immediattly impressive. Really huge with very ornately decorated buildings. There is a cathedral and a museuam and a view of the royal appartments. There are three queues for each of these which looks to be at least an hour long.... We opt instead to take a few photos, buy some postcards and then head back through the centre back to the Hostel for the bus....

Once back at the hostel, we start talking to the other people who are heading to Auschwitz. The tour is 100 zlotys, we could almost definately do it cheaper by public transport, but for ease of getting there the bus is good. It's also a good way to meet other travellers in the hostel and get a bit of a chinwag about where people have been, where to go next, the tricks people use to rip you off etc....

As soon as we're out of Krakow, we are on Country B-Roads.... The scenery remains un remarkable.... too flat for my liking. The conversations and laughing and joking(Bizarrely on a Bus to Auschwitz) makes the journey fly by pretty quickly.

We arrive at Auschwitz and join our tour... They don't seem to a have a toilet at the main gate, so we hop along with the tour.

Since I decided to come here, I;ve been numbing myself to what I'm going to see. The edge is take off it by the lines of tour buses that sit outside of the place and the people with Cameras and Video Cameras.... It says no photos, but the guide was even telling us to take photos... I took the odd one, of Brabed wires fences and such just to say I've been there... It's chilling when you go off on your own and you can imagine lines and lines of tired, abused broken people walking along on the same ground you are.

The tour basically involves standing in a queue of people and shuffling round little corridors as the guide tells you all the facts that you already know.... There's some really moving stuff like huge piles of dicarded shoes and stuff... You some how fel closer to the people in the camp by seeing there belonging all stacked together with little identity or individuallity... We were at the Holcoast Memorial in Berlin... Its' hundreds of Pillars of concrete of varying sizes sitting at varying degrees. We surmised that it was about individuality and human characteristics that from affar can't be seen. The shoes are kind of the same.

After about 2 hours, we grow weerie of the tour... well not so much the tour, but the shuffling. It's hot... we need a pee and my head is getting sore... all in all I feel very uncomfortable... This could be because of what I'm witnessing.... some kind of bizarre sub concious reaction...

After Auschwitz I it's Auschwitz II Birkenau. Auschwitz I was an ex army barracks. Auschwitz II is a flat land with huts and chimney's as far as the eye can see... The train goes straight through the main gate, where the prisoners were divided into fit and unfit and sent into a gas chamber or to a work barracks... There's huts for over 100,000 people... the sheer scale of this death factory is phenominal.....

We head back on the bus and everyone agrees that they didn't really know how to react. I didn't feel I gained much from my trip, but I'm glad I went. I suppose I expected to learn something new about this period of history... but it's so commonly documented that you almost feel like you've been there before, so the horro doesn't really hit you... that and the american standing behind you saying "Gee this is great - get a shot of that Hank...."

We get back to Krakow quite late, and the only things left to do are get a cold beer and some more din dins and then decide where we're going tomorrow.... after studying train timetables online for a few hours, we come to the conclusion that it's Budapest......

Good Night....

Arriving in Poland

We arrive din Poland on Tuesday night after a long boring train journey. It's strange, I think it makes it more boring having a travel companion. You've got someone to complain too about the boredom. The scenery was unremarkable...... I can't get my photos to upload just now... so this will be a purely textual experience until I do.....We listened to some jimmy Carr Stand up on theiPod. It's hilariously funny, and many people were wondering what type of music we were listening to that could make us snigger so much.

We arrived in Krakow station, weerie and needing a bed for the night. The station was huge and seemed to be one big set of roadworks..... we had already booked a hostel by phone, so set about trekking across the roadworks and trying to make sense of Polish street signs..... The Hostel was nice enough.... very basic, maybe about 3 beds across three dorms.... It was dark by now, and we headeded down to Rynek Glowny - The mian square...... It's huge!!! a huge big square with lots of old impressive buildings, the hugest of which is the Cloth Hall.... It's similar to the Rynek's that I have been to in Warsaw and Poznan... even down to the same chains selling very unpolish food...

OUr first stop is a well deserved beer... it is Okocim....

Having not eaten anything other than munchies and train food for the whole day, we check the lonely planet for some restaurants that are cheap enough for our budget and also serve something a bit more Polish than the Mexican restaurant..... after finding a few closed places, we settle in a little place.... It's very cheap.... so we're not sure of the size of the portions... we wolf down a CHicken Schnitzel and some roast pork in a cumin sauce... very tasty... very hearty.... but not enough.... it will do us for the night though.... we head home for our first night in the hostel.... we finally get to sleep after getting a mattress from the staff because they'd overbooked.....

Apologies.....

My apologies... I am travelling too much and falling behind on the blog. I've still to write up the trip to scotlnad.... a trip to Italy... a Guns N Roses Concert, an Alice in Chains concert, and 2 weeks in Austria..... We've(Me and Luke SkyeTrekker) just arrived in Poland, after getting a long train from Berlin, where I spent 10 wonderful days exploring Berlin with Paprika.... from now on for the rest of August, we're hopping around eatern europe with our homes on our backs like turtles.... so the blog will be a wee bit more sporadic, while stealing the odd moment of internet time on Hostel Computers.....


Here's some photies from Berlin: