The Railroad to Nowhere

I should've learned my lesson after Egyptians would call and ask me which bus goes to the airport or go to get to this or that place: Don't put blind faith in locals...even if they are your good friends.

Marty has definitely been there. I once put him on the wrong local bus in Cairo. The guy told me it was going to the place Marty wanted, but apparently there are two of those places in Cairo. This bus was going to the other one.

Call it karma, call it the transportation ruling body exacting revenge, call it whatever you want. I put my blind faith in a local friend and ended up on the railroad to nowhere.

It started at the architectural catastrophe that is Warsaw Central Train Station. My friend had helped me buy my ticket and then took me to the platform. A train was sitting there. She was sure it was the right one (I even asked her for confirmation) and watched as I got in and sat down. A few minutes later the train departed with me thinking I was on my way to Krakow.

The train plodded its way through the Warsaw suburbs and arrived at a station called "Warsawa Wschodnia." I had no idea what the second word meant, but it didn't really matter. It did strike me as odd, though, that nobody was on the train. The conductor had said something about Krakow, but again I didn't understand.

You know that feeling you get when you know something isn't right? That's what I felt about a minute after the train left the station. We moved along at a snail's pace for the next five minutes, eventually coming to a stop in the middle of a train yard. "Oh no. This is bad. This is definitely bad," I remember thinking. What could I do, though? So I just sat there and read my book.

After about ten minutes, a group of engineers came into the car. One look at me caused them to make a bee line right to my seat and start yapping at me in Polish. I could pick out a word or two (thankfully, Polish and Russian are similar enough in this specific instance). It seemed pretty clear that the train was not going any further and that I had to go back to the previous station if I wanted to go to Krakow. One of the guys even summed up the courage to say, "Train finished," in his best Polish-accented English.

Another of the men called me over to the open door of the carriage. He pointed at an engine and yelled, "Mashina! Mashina! Warsawa Wschodnia!" I confirmed his command by pointing and asking, "Krasnaya mashina? (Red Engine?)" He replied, "Tak, tak, tak (yes, yes, yes)."

Out the door I went. I needed to cross about six different tracks before I could reach the desired train. What an adventure. I felt like I was riding the rails. It was quite a leap to get into one of the cars on the train the guy had been pointing at. Apparently it was about to start its journey to Berlin.

Ten minutes later I was on my way back to Warsawa Wschodnia (it means "Warsaw East" in Polish...Krakow is in southwestern Poland). There I reaffirmed my belief that language is almost never logical. The word for departure in Polish has a prefix which is the same as the preposition "from." Logic would tell you that this makes absolutely no sense. I had to find a translation somewhere to realize that I had been confusing the words for Departures and Arrivals.

It all worked out in the end. I ended up in Krakow a mere two hours later than expected. My friend's evil tendencies, however, know no limits.