Poland: Getting There

We left Copenhagen the morning of the 18th...Nathans (please excuse any bad grammar in this post, very confusing keyboard) 30th Birthday, and hopped on a 22 hour train ride to Krakow. Thats right, poor Nathan spent his entire birthday on a train...I felt so bad for him...and this was no ordinary train ride. First we rode for a few hours through Denmark where we sat next to the loudest group of rude Australian boys, then our train got onto a ferry (yes, the whole entire train goes on to the ferry) as we ferried accross the water into Germany. Then we switched trains to a local, fairly uncomfortable train and rode it through Germany until it dumped us out at the Poland border, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere. We finally found the train station where we attempted to decipher signs in Polish trying to figure out where we needed to catch our next (overnight) train into Krakow. After about an hour and a half wait, we were at the platform we thought we needed to be at to catch our train. We showed our tickets to a group of rail station employees hoping they could tell us if we were at the right train and where our car was...each of them pointed in different directions and argued with each other, finally telling us that we should get on the train in front of us. We reluctantly jumped on, hoping that it would take us in the right direction and were immediately accosted by people grabbing our tickets and trying to point us in the right direction - again, everyone pointed us in different directions until a train employee told us he thought we should walk toward the back of the train - though he worked there, even he seemed unsure that it was the correct way to go. We tried our luck though and began walking through car after car trying to find our seats. Each time we walked through the doors of a new car there would be a new group of locals crowded into the corridor greeting us, laughing and yelling what seemed to be nice helpful sentiments and trying to help us find our seats as we would squeeze past and smush them with our bags...it was such a trip. We finally found our car...the last car on the train. It is still probably the most surreal 15 minutes of our trip so far. Happy birthday, Nathan...