Jamie Klinger

So here’s a story about a 4 hour busride and a great necessary restroom trip.

I get on the bus with Kat & Ben (my aussie pals) and ride onwards. I grab the 5 seater at the back and sleep on and off for the first two hours, then we stop to pick some people up and I have to go to the bathroom. We start moving where I regrettably had the time to run to a bathroom then, but I consider that there’s a toilet on the bus and go there.

The door is locked. Clearly, it’s non-functioning. The gosh-darned bus has wifi but no bathroom. Two hours of a ride left and I have to go to the bathroom already…wonderful. An hour passes. I see a guy go to the front of the bus and it looks like we’re pulling over to a Holiday Inn, I guess for a bathroom break, I go to the front of the bus right after the guy gets off and as I’m getting there, the door closes and we start moving again…Hmmm…Ok.

Kat suggests I go tell the bus driver, and that he’ll pull over. Ok, good idea. I go up to the man, tell him that I have to go to the washroom, and he seems a bit confused, but says ‘next stop’. I say ok, and go back to my seat. We’re about a half hour from our destination and some people are getting off, and this woman with awful eyeshadow flags me to get off. So I hop off on this seemingly busy street, wondering why the hell we’d stop here for me to go to the bathroom, but ok.

I ask the woman if he’ll wait for me and she said yes. I cross the street and she says I can go to this pub or the public restroom right in the park. I turn around and the bus is a block away. Ummm…Crap.

Well, I still have to go to the bathroom, and this was my priority, so instead of running after the bus, I run to the pub, take a leak, and head back out. Fortunately, there was a guy on the bus who waited for me after understanding what happened and directed me to the bus stop and told me to take it to X, then to take the underground to Y (the bus station). My adrenaline was pumping and I could only imagine how Ben & Kat felt while this was going on.

The bus came within a few minutes, brought me from Buda to Pest across the bridge, and I hopped off to find the underground. From there, I took it about 5 stops and went running to find Kat & Ben. They’d been waiting for only about ten minutes…I was magic fast.

When I asked them what happened on their side, they told me they tried to fight their way to the front of the bus, but this doublesized woman was holding them back, and then when they did get there, the bus driver didn’t speak English and had no idea what they were trying to tell him so they needed to find a translator.

As it turns out, ‘washroom’ is very similar to the name of the street that the bus driver let me off at. Go figure. All I’ll be saying is Toaleta from now on.

Made 25 euro playing in a poker room, nearly lost my the 170 I sat with, heh. Tis how it goes.

Anyhow, I just wanted to post this photo quickly before I pack up, it’s from the train ride to Krakow from Torun.

Learning about history, seeing an ugly castle, a nice square, some churhes and a whole whack of statues. Traveling with a pair of wonderful Aussies (Ben & Cat) who I met in Krakow a few days back. I’ll try to update more photos soon. Going to try and play some poker here, there’s a room right by my 13€ hostel…and tomorrow, my 12€ bus to Hungary.

The weather was perfect for it though. Gloomy, foggy, ever-so-slightly rainy and drab. It was educational and horrific. Even being there, it still remained hard to imagine. Seeing kilograms of hair filling a room was definitely disturbing. Walking through a gas chamber…the idea of so many people having been sacrificed for evil there was impossible to fathom…I really just couldn’t grasp it.

Hey ever’body. I took the train from Torun at 1am and hung out with some wonderful geography students heading to the mountains 8 hours from there to do some geology experiments with rockin’ hammers.

I have a nice photo of them sleeping, but don’t have it on the comp yet, I’ll have to do that later. But really, you guys are awesome.

As I was getting here, at 10:30am (yup, 9.5 hr train ride), the rain started slowly, I bought a strange looking croissant with chocolate on both ends for about 1.30zt, the equivalent of about 33 cents Canadian. It had some chocolate pudding type liquid in it, I enjoyed it meekly.

I arrived at the hostel (Goodbye Lenin Hostel) and it sits nearly in the middle of the old city. I quickly met a pack of 9 Lithuanians and I asked if I could join them on their trip to Auschwitz tomorrow; it shall be a party.

We went to the grocery store, bought some grub, came back, made some breakfast, then went for respective napping. I’m not sure what they’re all up to now, but it’s raining enough that I feel like they’re still sleeping after their 800km drive from Lithuania.

Currently, half-watching Eurotrip with a gang of girls; origin unknown.