The Train Story

First, a quick update. I'm in northern Poland in a town called Gdansk. Poland is a great country. Forget all the Polish jokes you know.

Iain, Adrian and I caught the night train to Krakow. So on the ride they both mention stories of people getting gassed on night trains in Poland and getting their bags ransacked. I thought they were full of shit, but a lot of the Poles we talked to were surprised nothing happened to us. Lonely Planet has a warning in theiur book about this as well. I guess we were lucky.

At the start of our journey there were five people in our compartment. By the second or third hour it was just the three of us. Adrian already had his towel and swim trunks out and drying since we didn't have time to air them out after the bath house. I followed suit and Iain did as well. That was when we figured out the smell in our room in Budapest was not sewage, but Iain's towel. He hadn't washed it in more than two weeks and it was beginning to sour a bit. I guess that helped keep others out of our cabin.

I got out a pack of cards and we started to play shithead to find out who the ultimate shithead between the three of us would be. We were lounging and playing cards when we reached the border of Hungary and Poland.

The Hungarian border guard grabbed my passport and said to me, "Your name is Tran, Viet Nam?" I told him yes and smiled cause I thought he was getting a kick out of my name. He was not amused.

"And you were born in Michigan, USA?"
"Yes."

He rubbed the passport to see if there were any faults, and flipped through the pages a few times and eyeballing me the whole time. He finally stamped my passport, in the middle of the page. Thanks, asshole.

Now on to the Polish guards. They took my passport and opened up this huge book that looked like some ragged spell book Gandalf might read through. I wasn't sure what the hell they were cross referencing in the book, but I was cleared and stamped and we were on our way again.

The grand tournament to find the ultimate shithead continued and as the night wore on Rick Astley possessed us and Never Gonna Give You Up became the theme for the night. It's a story to be told some other time and it's really not that interesting. Just one of those songs that happened to come on at an opportune moment. Around midnight Iain was crowned The Ultimate Shithead.

I went to use the disgusting toilet just before bed and thanked a higher power I wasn't born a girl as I left the toilet. On the way back I noticed the compartment next to ours was empty. I asked Iain if he wanted to sleep there cause he's 6'4" and there's a lot of space for him to stretch out. Both he and Adrian said no caused they were kind of scared of getting gassed and raped or something.

I said fuck it and went into the empty train car. The train was already hot, but whoever was in there before had the heat turned up, so I had to shut it off and open the window. I locked the door and laid down. Just as I was falling asleep the conductor banged on the door and checked my ticket. Afterwards I fell back asleep. THe next thing I remember was someone grabbing my ankle and pulling it. I snapped awake, but it was another conductor asking to check my ticket. It must have been four in the morning at this point.

I woke up around five in the morning because POland gets light out beginning at 4:30 and the sun is fully up by 5:00. We rolled into Krakow around 5:30 and started over again. New country, new money, new language.