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After spending a week with family in Sweden, cured of the last lingering remnants of jet-lag, the time has finally come to embark on our 2018 survey of eastern Europe. When travelling, our expectation is rarely that we speak the local tongue to any meaningful degree beyond timidly uttering basic courtesies when engaging with the locals. However, this time, by virtue of departing from Sweden where I still retain some modicum of fluency, the change feels even more abrupt than usual and profoundly humbling.

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Perhaps that is one of the reasons, there’s a palpable sense of trepidation stepping onto the overnight ferry in Ystad, Sweden departing to the impossible-to-pronounce and even more difficult to spell Świnoujście. We had been too late in booking and as a result were left cabin-less and roaming the ship for chairs to at least make the appearance that were serious about trying to get some sleep. Our only real criteria was to be as far away as possible from a raucous groups of Swedish retirees bent of draining any bottle within reach while making sure the rest of the ship where kept abreast of their progress.

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Once docked in Świnoujście without at least any maritime-grade incident, there was no escaping getting frisky with the Polish train system; we needed to get to Warsaw and we knew it would take at least 8 hours on two Inter-City (IC) trains. Meredith luckily had the foresight to direct me to stand in line before a lonely row of shuttered ticket booths before people starting pouring in. A full 15 minutes before scheduled departure, a woman who I’m reasonably confident is a direct descendant of Beelzebub himself, engaged in a one-sided flogging in blistering Polish and only reluctantly let me pay by credit card before flinging the boarding passes through the opening in the glass with such a deft hand I walked away with no other feeling than being rather impressed.

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As 8 hours on a train clearly wouldn’t be long enough, we were informed a few hours in to our train ride by a helpful local who spoke perfectly decent English that a coal-carrying freight train had derailed around the next station and we’d have to disembark and get on one of the provided buses to the next station after. Simple, right? Well, I’m sure it would have been if there were actually a reasonable number of buses showing up to shuttle people to that station. Instead, we were privy to a display of human behaviour that is, shall we say, less than flattering as people adopted the scholarly principle of ” every sausage for himself” to the point a nun (I kid you not) was kicked off a bus that too many people had elbowed their way onto.

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Mind you, I’m not preaching from some impeachable high ground of moral supremacy here. Oh, no. After not making it onto the second bus either and waiting around for an hour an a half for the third bus to even show up, all the while the sidewalks kept filling up as more trains are arriving with their confused cargo, our elbows sharpened considerably to the point we would probably not have been pegged for Canadian. We knew we had at least five more hours of traveling, of which four would be in a train we’d no longer have seats, after getting on that shuttle and we would yield to no man.

Instead of a leisurely arrival in Warsaw at the scheduled time of 4pm, we scraped ourselves off the train car a bracing 6 hours late. At least we have 5 full days in beautiful Warsaw to recover.

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