Midnight on the night train across Poland
Sunday, 20, Sep 2009 09:02
Stuck in a couchette travelling from Krakow to Gdansk, Daniel Barnes looks at Poland as it rushes passed his window and captures the journey for travelbite.co.uk.
I got on the train and made my bed in the couchette in Krakow at 22:44.
It is now midnight and somehow I cannot sleep. As the train pulled into Katowice I notice someone is snoring.
Below is a child and his dyed blonde grandma heading to the sea on holiday. As the grandad dropped them off I was so glad when he waved them off as he was certainly a snorer.
The child seems a bit special - which is worrying as we are ten hours from our destination. Come 7am he is going to be bored and my patience will be low.
Opposite me is my girlfriend and I know she snores.
So it is all down to the students up top. There seem to be three students in the two top bunks - but still they snore.
Someone has ham sandwiches (prime suspect: the babcia) and they smell.
A further problem is the window. My feet are freezing - but with six or seven bodies trapped in a carriage over 12 hours we need it open. Especially as old women fart.
00:21 Occasionally a bad smell belches through the gap into the carriage. It could well be smells of Poland, but I am very aware of the toilet at the end of the carriage.
Polish train toilets work on the principle that excrement and urine disappear through a hole and onto the wheels and tracks.
The rest - and the reasons for my smell fears - I leave to your imagination.
The idea is to go to sleep in Krakow and wake-up in Gdansk.
The prospect is I either drink myself to sleep, or chart each moment tonight.
00:30 The child is kicking the bottom of my bed. He is awoken by someone knocking the carriage wall next door.
Out the window, Poland so far seems a series of grim tower blocks, red lights in the distance, factories and slag heaps.
00:55 The snoring has stopped, someone is fidgeting: I'm so bored and not tired. Will start on my novel.
03:34 I am confused.
03:47 I think the train has switched direction. Or I have turned over in my sleep. The new direction means the toilet is down track - which is good - and the smell is just Poland.
Also good as I must go to the toilet.
03:50 Will try to start the long slow - and hopefully quiet - descent.
03:56 The toilet is horrible. Dirt seems generations old and - as the couchette carriages have Russian writing on the outside - I guess the filth is international.
Dirty toilets on trains is a bit of travelling cliché - but for the uninitiated, UK trains with sticky moulded plastic and wide access for disabled passengers may as well be in Narnia in central and eastern Europe.
The flush is lift the flap and you can see the rails. How refreshing to feel my urine will be adding strength to the Polish countryside.
You pump water for the basin with your foot. On the upside, my hair has gone all Noel Fielding - unfortunately my complexion isn't performing at its best.
04:04 I was about to say we are now speeding to Warsaw. But we have stopped in the middle of no-where.
The babcia is snoring.
04:07 Six more hours and the novel is not going well as all I can think of is how I would put my trousers on in an emergency.
04:19 Have strange pins and needles in my little finger and have just read my emails. (This is meant as a means of showing how technologically advanced and amazing Poland can be and at the same time not to define and defame a whole nation because of a dirty toilet.)
04:23 The sheets are branded 'Wars'.
The dining car has the sign 'Bar Wars'.
05:05 The sun is just starting to get up and we have stopped somewhere that I think is Warsaw. Which is a bit rubbish as the daytime intercity Krakow-Warsaw train only takes three and a bit hours.
Passing local Warsaw trains full of people starting - or ending - their day is a bit odd, especially seeing the people on the platforms of the semi-subterranean stations in the capital. The Varsovians shuttering along platforms and one teenager walking a chihuahua is a strange thing to see from my bedroom window.
The wide grey empty platforms of Warsaw Central are a bizarre sight.
It smells in here a bit.
Five hours to go. Strangely I am feeling calm.
I forgot to mention passing Czestochowa - probably because I was asleep. The town has factories, a Black Madonna and lots of pilgrimages. It is Poland being traditional and religious, but also with industry in decline.
It is hard to explain how important religion is to Poland. During Communism, Catholicism was a form of rebellion against the authorities. A strong religious moral streak lies through Polish politics and daily life today - with the churches packed on Sundays, including youths who in the UK would be the recipients of Asbos.
The Black Madonna is one of the most important religious icons in Poland.
Madonna played her first concerts in Poland this year. Somehow some of the more conservatives found it an offence that she was performing on Assumption.
05:23 Just crossing the Wisla in Warsaw and seeing the sun rise on the water. Yesterday I saw the sun set over the Wisla in Krakow.
Graffiti covered commuter trains are filling up under the fluorescent lights as people head to work for Tuesday. Strangely there seem to be lots of grey-haired women - all sat apart.
More factories and tower blocks lead off into the distance. Does red sky in the morning... work in Poland?
I'm struggling to physically write at the moment. I need to sleep.
The boy laughed in his sleep.
05:38 There is something affecting about the grand 1970s blocks and cracking crumbling concrete stations around Warsaw.
It was a time of great optimism in Poland as international loans funded an exciting time for the nation of building, art, sporting success and industry.
The country - it must have seemed - was finally climbing out of the mire of World War II and rebuilding itself. The strains of war and Stalinism were finally past and socialist salad days were upon Poland. Students were sent to factories and the fields to learn the true value of work.
But the loans needed to be paid and the money was badly spent. The late 1970s and 1980s brought shortages, empty shop shelves, long queues and eventually martial law, as Solidarity rose as an opposition.
Travelling through Poland - even at breakneck speed - you can see very visible signs both of decay and a new land.
We have passed abandoned factories with broken windows and no future but to crumble, but also massive Ikeas and golf courses.
Poland has poverty and one foot very firmly in the past - but a future. Every young person's dream seems to be to get enough money to buy land and build a big house. It is sad so many people will be left behind.
For all those working for Motorola, Nokia, Siemens et al, there are many people getting 6 zloty (£1.30) an hour. Or those whose only way out is to drink.
At the station in Krakow it was awful to see people in their 50s and 60s sleeping on benches.
While the terrible sight of old homeless people hits, Krakow's new station is built around a massive shopping centre with designer clothes and coffees with private security guards with robots preserving for the new middle classes.
New blocks of flats are now rising - as Poland sees a new age of optimism. There is just the nagging fear, it may have all been paid for by cheap loans that will have to be repaid post-crunch.
And greying drunks will be sleeping at the station for many more years. Poland has, however, managed to be the only European state to avoid recession.
05:58 The bloody kid is kicking the bottom of my bed.
06:55 In the country now and the morning sun shines down on giant haystacks that may as well be Hardy's Wessex with tractors as 21st century Poland. Except the Polish Gabriel Oak is covering his rick with blue tarpaulin.
Green houses glimmer in the sunshine but we not too far from the settings of grand 19th century Polish dramas, generals in large hats and further mismanagement.
At the time Poland had reached the point where all the nobles came together to elect their king. Sometimes a foreign prince - with divine breeding for the role - or a strong Pole.
But bad leadership and corruption saw the great Polish empire that took in Lithuania, parts of Ukraine and down to the Black Sea cut back and eventually chopped up by Russia, Germany and Austria. The same empire so influential in defeating the Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna was carved up and Poland disappeared.
Many Poles see their history of bursts of genius and then ashes - often due to betrayal.
In some cases it is true, such as the murder of the Polish officers who fought for their nation's freedom against Nazi Germany - and all the horrors inflicted. But the victorious soldiers were killed by liberating Soviet troops, because such heroes did not rest well with the new order and 'freedom'.
Tales of national betrayal ring through Polish history - and tales of the role of Poles in their own downfall are ignored. The nation is now split: to be modern and outward looking with PM Donald Tusk or looking back and inwards with President Lech Kaczynski.
But perhaps this is a simplification.
07:43 More green and pleasant land.
08:54 The stink from the countryside is unbearable.
The boy has discovered poking the bottom of my bed - which is rather like a massage.
09:30 We stop at Malbork.
I first heard if Malbork from a Polish 1970s children's TV series about the search for lost gold in the castle.
The castle at the centre of the town was built by Teutonic knights after the crusades. This part of Poland then was Prussia - running along the coast through the Russian outpost Kaliningrad - or Königsberg as it was - and beyond. The knight set out on a new crusade against the pagans in what are now the Baltic states. Polish kings had long known of the diplomatic benefit of being Catholic.
The castle itself is a great red brick stronghold that does not seem terribly historic. Not surprising as it was heavily damaged in World War II. Then part of Germany, it formed a useful link to the past in the Nazi search for a grand German mythology.
But it is a reminder how the straight lines of nation states have ebbed and flowed over the centuries. There is a saying - Poles are not geese, they have their own language. Across the centuries Poles have spread across the world - like the Irish but without theme bars - but the strength of the language and common identity, fuelled like any nation by conveniently-read history and folklore, has maintained them.
We are used to Poles across the UK now, including those who stayed after the war. But Chicago is home to more Poles than every Polish city except Warsaw.
When Poland disappeared its soldiers fought for Napoleon on the promise of a return. They turned up in Italy, the American War of Independence and beyond. It is said there are parrots in Brazil that speak and swear in Polish because of the migrants.
Where that identity will lead is now uncertain.
10:37 I've sped past ancient academic Krakow, industrial and struggling Katowice, religious Czestochowa, Warsaw advancing from grey blocks to technology, passed the Teutonic castles of Malbork and into Gdansk.
Gdansk and the shipyards where Lech Walesa and Solidarity rose to eventually topple Communism, with the Pope and the Black Madonna offering support. Walesa is often seen with a Black Madonna pin badge.
Gdansk like many European ports is suffering industrially but rebuilding itself - looking to the Baltic and Scandinavia.
All it needs is Doctor Who and it could be Cardiff. However, it also has a magnificent old town to explore- more German than Polish in areas as the city was once called Danzig.
I'm happy to be leaving the train and see where Poland will take me and herself next.
After a night travelling, I hope the first place is a cup of coffee, or a beer in the baking sunshine.
Daniel Barnes
The author apologises for historical mistakes, but would like to remind readers this was written on an overnight train and has only been edited for spelling and grammar.