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Some places we’re OK to leave behind us in pursuit of new venues, others we feel we could have stayed a few more days to wring additional experiences out of before moving on. Warsaw is the latter. To make the most of our rapidly diminishing time before the train would take us on to Kraków, we would take one more pass at the Old Town to get a few more sunny day pictures. We had initially planned to include the Copernicus Science Centre on the agenda for our last full day, however tickets for this scientific institution had been sold out for the day. Looking around it was not hard to understand why. Warsaw proper was positively overrun with school groups. Like sports hooligans dressed up in their team garb, these groups were colour-coordinated with such high-viz vibrancy as to make the coast guard proud. One wonders about the merits of dressing up the school children for the purpose of easy identification in neon orange if everyone else does the same thing.

 

 

Wise from previous experience where we learned just how well-utilized the Polish train system can be, we decided to not wait until the last minute to purchase tickets. Similar to many other places, certainly in Europe at least, there are options. In Poland, the Inter City, or IC, is the fastest but of course the speed comes at a price. For the budget-conscious traveler, the TLK, which is an abbreviation that translates roughly to “Your Railway Line” (Soviet-vibes, anyone?) is a perfectly viable alternative. For the benefit of an extra 90 minutes or so riding the rails, two people pay 128zl instead of the fancy-pants IC equivalent of 300zl. Thanks to our painfully obtained experience in getting to Warsaw, we were able to, drum-roll please, reserve seats! Indeed, we were able to sit in actual chairs for the duration of this train ride, which is more than we could say for some people who had bought their tickets later than us.

Despite having to have our train wait for a couple of the aforementioned ICs to thunder by with their precious cargo of high-rollers, we arrive in Kraków Główny pretty much on schedule and on budget. While we knew where we wanted to go and that we needed to take trams to get there (walking 45 mins with our double packs and bags of left-over food was not an appealing prospect), it was not clear at the time how we would figure out which trams to take and in which direction and where to buy tickets. In Warsaw, these ticket kiosks were figuratively everywhere. In the main train station in Krakow, we would see a spotted owl, before coming across one of those things. The solution to our conundrum (which I blame in equal measure on low blood sugar and non-existent Polish) was embarrassingly simple; Enter one of the tunnels that eventually leads to a platform (which may or may not be the correct one, in our case it was not) to get a tram map mounted so low one had to squat to read it and a single kiosk that blessedly gave you the option of switching to English to buy our tickets. Presto! 10 minutes later we are on our way in a tram that looked like it came straight out of a Bombardier brochure. Finally settled in Kraków.

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