The Rail to Krakow: Lessons in Making no Assumptions

When you’re several hours into a train ride to Krakow & the conductor casually looks at your ticket and says, “you do know that this train is headed to Warsaw, right?” you know it is going to be a long night. Especially when you’d been traveling for 7+ hours already. I went straight from Kutna Hora to Krakow. It was a couple tiny trains to Kolín, and then from there most of the day on a single train to Krakow.  Or so I thought.

You know you’re in a rural place when they ask you to mind the trains roaring by at 150kph when you cross the tracks on foot…to stand on “Platform 3” – a very narrow strip of pavement as passing trains threaten to rip off your appendages.

Here’s the problem. I cannot ride facing backward in a train as it gives me motion sickness. And it wouldn’t me the direction of the train online. So I went into the České dráhy office to purchase the ticket specifically so I could get a forward-facing seat.  Except that they too could not do this. And, as luck would have it, my assigned seat was backward. There were no empty seats in my car so I went to the next car where I found an unreserved forward-facing seat. Then, in Bohomín, 5 hours into my trip, there was a long wait and away we went. Unbeknownst to me, during this delay, the train was split in two and half continued to Krakow and half went to Warsaw! Look at this ticket and tell me where it says that?

So the boring part of the story is that the conductor had me exit the next stop switch trains, and I was only an hour late. But my overall take-home message is, be careful what you assume. Even if that means assuming your entire train will go to the planned destination.

I was so happy to meet up with Michelle!  We immediately found some food and drink and talked for hours. Michelle made gin and tonics at the flat and more hours of talking.

I’ve been to Krakow before and I was hesitant to go again, thinking perhaps that I wouldn’t see anything new.  I saw so many new things, the cloth market, the main square, countless churches, Kazimierz & the Shindler musuem, etc. I met up with Michelle and she wanted to do a guided tour to give us the lay of the land. At first I didn’t want to, but I wasn’t feeling great – something to do with those gin and tonics – so I agreed to a driving tour in a glorified golf cart. I’m glad we did it. We settled on a few things I’ve never done and we stopped at some stunning churches I’d not seen before.

One such place was the Corpus Christi church. We both inhaled a “wow” when we entered and then the driver said, “hold your ‘wow’ ” and he was so right. We rounded the corner to see a blaze of gold. So so much gold! Click on the left photo above to see the full effect.

Kazimierz, the Jewish Quarter, is always a very sobering experience. There were some 65,000 Jews living in Krakow, side-by-side with Christians before the war. They were forced into ghettos, bounded by a wall intentionally made to look like tombstones, and then murdered. After the war, there remained only 5,000. It’s so painful it is suffocating.

It’s kind of hard to continue writing after that. But we did move on to other things. For some reason, I’d never been to the Wawel castle. So we toured the royal apartments and also saw the Dragon’s Den. The royal flats were interesting and regal of course.

The Dragon’s den was almost a disappointment (countless fragments of columns from other places) until it wasn’t. That’s when we traversed a winding catwalk over deep archeological digs that found the castle continued very deep into the ground, dating back to the 1000’s.

So cool. That’s all I can say. I will really miss old stuff when I go back to the U.S.

I basically had pierogies every day and did not get sick of it. But my favorite place was one Jill’s brother Mike took us to back in 2014, Pod Zlata Pipa. Michelle loved it too.

My favorite church was St. Mary’s Basilica. It was so insanely colorful. And more vibrant even than St. Matthias in Budapest.

It was spring here, with all the fruit trees flowering madly. Priests and nuns were out in droves, identifiable in their garb – so much so, that we wondering if something was up. Indeed there was some sort of event, though no one could tell us quite what.

In case you were wondering, on the way back to Ostrava, I stayed in my own train car and actually got to watch the separation process to split the trains and move an engine.