5.27.07

now i'm in a new apartment, a cozy space i can easily keep an eye on. as emily pointed out last night over gin & tonics, "all your wood matches!" luxuries. i've been cleaning, arranging, and standing, looking out my windows. the view: treetops, a bunny, the occasional bird, and little pieces of congress street. so far, things seem better. i'm spreading out.

bratislava -> krakow

the train to krakow came early. by 8.30 we were sitting in (what turned out to be) a smoking car, rolling through slovakia towards brno. we changed trains in breclav (said bretts-lauw), happy to be on time and have gotten that far. we picked out chocolate and sandwiches in the convenience store in the station, maneuvering our ungainly, 50-pound luggage around precarious stacks of merchandise covered in logos i couldn't read. while niki continued to browse, i went to the bathroom and made the first of many attempts to buy toilet paper from a strident attendant i couldn't understand. i didn't have any currency small enough for the posted price and she didn't seem to be able to give me change. when i tried to show her i didn't mind overpaying (it amounted to less than five cents), she threw up her hands and gave me the paper.

later, in buying our sandwiches, the women at the cash register became visibly upset. they had no english and niki couldn't make sense of their slovak. after they took some bills out of the register and waved them in front of us, niki realized that we weren't, in fact, in slovakia. we were in the czech republic. our slovak crowns weren't good here and we'd ruffled some national feathers by thinking they were slovaks. niki got some czech koruna from the ATM and i picked out some surreal postcards. we ate egg and onion sandwiches sitting on dirty concrete blocks, watching the board and trying to identify which side was departures. i looked out a window, watching a woman sitting on a bench in front of a church across the street through different panes. an asian man walked by wearing gold lame pants, and it was remarkable.

the train from breclav to katovice (cat-oh-veetsa) was filled with farmland. every small cottage had a little rectangle out back filled with busy gardens, dilapidated fences, chickens, and sloping roofs of tiny sheds. sometimes there were whole networks of these rectangles clustered behind a tract of houses. i wanted to save each one in all its detail. i slept about half the way, only waking when the train stopped at the polish border.

we made it to katovice with twenty minutes til our next train. the station was mostly underground, the walls dirty concrete covered in torn, rubbed-off posters. pigeons were everywhere. we couldn't read anything on the departures board, but it was a moot point since it didn't seem to be working. none of the ticket staff spoke english or slovak. we started running through the station, luggage banging into my knees behind us, trying to locate our platform.

it was the first place we'd been where we both felt unsafe and we were panicked that we were going to get stranded in the underground bunker of posters and pigeon shit. i stayed with the luggage and tried to decipher a piece of yellow paper tacked over shredded posters that i thought might've been a schedule. niki approached anyone who walked by and asked if they spoke english. she got taken up a platform by an older man where he walked her around for awhile, speaking in polish with his arm thrown over her shoulder. i started to come after her, getting a little concerned, when she extricated herself and met me on the stairs. we saw our english prick up the ears of an attractive, well-kept blonde guy in his 30s. he read the yellow paper and safely delivered us to our platform (ended up being the one we'd started out on).

safely ensconced in the bright red seats, niki took out her planning folder and started reading aloud all the possible tourist destinations we could frequent in krakow. most of them involved beer, dragons, or both. i watched the landscape slide by while she sunk into the trashy fantasy book i'd brought her. bombed out buildings from world war ii, still unrepaired, lining the tracks. well-dressed people picking their way through the rubble, apparently on the way back from some unseen downtown. graffiti everywhere; no relationship to neighborhood or poverty level.

we pulled the luggage off our last train in krakow, visiting another ATM to get yet another currency in an underground marketplace. bread, nike sneakers, and more pigeons. we bounced the luggage over cobblestones of all sizes, navigating through a refreshing park and tracing our fingers along our map, inventing pronunciation of streets and inserting vowels with wild abandon as we went.

we paused in the main square, seconds before discovering our hostel, to see the sun set behind the cloth market. black spires against soft blue, pink. the air was warm. we were comfortable, and had arrived.