15th October 1997    2300
Kraków, Poland 
I caught a train back to Kraków today.  We had the most eventful journey.
The train stopped near the border between Slovakia and Poland and the military boarded the train and told us all to get off.  We were walked to a waiting bus, crammed into the bus like sardines and then the bus drove off into the countryside.  After travelling some distance the bus stopped and we all got out and marched across a muddy field to where a train was stopped.  We all got on this train and off we went again!  I had no idea what was going on, just following the flow of the locals who seemed to be taking it as normal practise.

In Kraków this time it was hard to find accomodation.   Some other traveller had given me a slip of paper with an address of a hostel that I should stay at. I had put in inside a book in my backpack, and thinking I remebered what the address was, we set out to find the place.  I thought the address was number 91, but when we got to number 91 it was just a vacant block.  After checking the address in my backpack, it turned out it was number 9 we wanted!
So we trudged back to number 9, but it certainly didn't look like a hostel, more like a block of apartments.
I went into the foyer to ask the attendant about a room while the four other travellers I met on the train waited outside.  When I asked the man behind the counter if he spoke English he replied "Po Polsku", I asked if he spoke French.... "Po Polsku", German.... "Po Polsku", I figured that he wasn't going to speak anything but Polish and he was gesturing to the women in the foyer behind me so I asked one of them if she spoke English.  She said not very much, but she told me to go to room three-elf....  (elf being 11 in German!) 
By this stage I was fairly convinced that it wasn't a hostel and we were wasting our time trying here. 
I went back outside to the four guys and told them the situation and that I thought we should go back into the centre of town to find accomodation.
They suggested I go back into the building and up to room 311 to ask.
So I went up to room 311 and knocked. A girl in the corridor said "Tak" to me, and when I asked her if she spoke English she said yes, and invited me into her room with her friends.  I ended up sitting down and having a drink with them, before remembering I had left the four guys outside in the freezing cold!!!!
The two girls, Patrycja and Magda, gave me some directions to a hostel and agreed to met with us in a pub the following night. 
I went down to the guys I had left out in the cold and explained to them, and we went of the the hostel recommended to us.  

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