Europe 1999: Krakow, Poland

Now it's about 5 in the afternoon, we're back at the train station and our sleeper train doesn't leave Oswiecim until midnight. This is a small town and there's nothing to do short of being stared at. So we switch our train tickets to go to Krakow first before heading out of Poland. (Not a bad feat considering we don't speak Polish and the ticket lady neither speaks English nor likes us.) Now we have train tickets which indicate we will arrive at the main Krakow station at 8:30pm. Yeah, right. We've been travelling for awhile and our train stops at a Krakow station, but not the main station. After a few minutes, it slowly moves backwards, then forwards, and stops again. It's only 8:00, so we can't yet be at the main Krakow station, right? A cleaning crew comes through the car. We ask someone (by pointing at our destination on the ticket) where the main station is, and he just points ahead. A conductor walks through the train and when we try to ask him about the stop, he waves us away and continues on. So we sit and wait a couple of minutes, then get off the train only to find the train is parked for the evening in a rural yard with a bunch of other trains, and there are no people and no station in sight. But we hear a paging system somewhere nearby, so we walk towards it, and eventually find a train station. Not the main station mind you - turns out that was 10 minutes earlier down the track, and our train never bothered to stop there. So with the help of a friendly ticket clerk, we hop the next train to town. Krakow itself seemed worthy of further investigation, but we only had a short time before catching our train out of Poland, and we didn't want to miss it. Poland Summary - No mobile phones, everything is dirt cheap.