I want to tell a story about a time I got lost in Poland.
It’s a story low on incident but high on atmosphere, at least as I remember it. The path of my life wasn’t changed by it, it doesn’t involve any major epiphanies or fateful meetings, but it’s a night I have come back to in my memory many times, and it bubbled to the surface last night, when I wrote down the following in one sitting at around 2am.
It was 1999, back when I was… younger, and I was living in Paris for a few months with an old college roommate of mine. We lived in a tiny walk-up on rue Crimée in the 19e arrondisement, least fashionable of all of Paris’ neighbourhoods. My most vivid memory of that apartment is was the stucco wall of the room I slept in, which was so intense and sharp that I would wake up with cuts and scratches on my hands from rolling over in the night and accidentally colliding with it.
My old friend Jim had come to visit—I remember him bringing a tape of the just-released Magnetic Fields’ album 69 Love Songs—and we set out for a little tour of Eastern Europe. I was particularly anxious to go to Prague again, where I had visited on a summer tour of Europe a few years earlier and had a week that still glowed in my memory as something somehow magical, transformative, though I wasn’t sure exactly how I was transformed. (I’m still not.) It was a disappointment. In the grey light of autumn, the energy and excitement I had felt was somehow dampened. And in those three short years, the city itself had changed; when I was there in 1996, expat early adopters were already complaining that it was losing its then-unique post-Cold-War shabby charm. By my second visit, the old workers’ bars I remembered visiting were gone and the city itself felt like it had sat up straighter and fixed its tie. (A third visit, in 2008, was completely depressing—Prague felt like any old Western European metropolis. And yeah, I know that those feelings are selfish. But it’s how I felt.)
But this isn’t a story about Prague. After Jim and I split up (he was heading to the Baltics, I believe, for reasons that are no longer clear to me—all I remember is that his bag got stolen on some ferry), I headed on to Krakow, Poland, where I’d always wanted to visit. I felt some anticipation traveling alone by train into the heart of Eastern Europe, among languages and even alphabets that were completely unfamiliar to me, but I felt relatively seasoned at that point so it wasn’t a huge deal, though I still don’t really like traveling alone. Something about not having someone to watch your bag while you go to the bathroom, or to talk to during dinner, is a huge energy suck. I’m normally a very sociable and outgoing person and having to spend several days in a row without being able to externalize my thoughts makes me a little crazy.
I don’t remember anything about the train journey, except the usual anxiety about getting off at the wrong stop (when traveling by train I always have this fear of accidentally disembarking at some desolate outlying suburban station by mistake). I arrived at Krakow late at night, and it’s fuzzy in my recollection whether I had called ahead for a reservation at the hostel I’d picked out of my guidebook for the first night, or whether I called from the station. I think it was the latter, or maybe I called to get instructions on how to get there.
I remember the station being surprisingly busy. Not everyone seemed to be waiting for a train, either—the waiting area was surprisingly bustling, full of people who looked like they had either been there for a long time, maybe even living there, or maybe it was just a place where people hung out at night, to find shelter from the cold.
Outside the station were food carts, big ones with glass windows through which I could see rotating rotisserie chickens. They reminded me how hungry I was, but I was a vegetarian at the time and didn’t see anything I could readily identify as being “safe” to eat. I was also in that paradoxical stage of hypoglycemic hunger where figuring out what to eat and how to acquire it—especially in a foreign language—seems like an impossible hassle. I hoped I would be able to get something to eat in or around the hostel. It was a cold November night.
I got on the streetcar and found to my slight dismay that it was taking me away from what I had perceived to be the city center—looks like the hostel wasn’t as close to the old town as I had hoped. As instructed, I waited five stops, though on a nearly-empty streetcar in the middle of the night, with the driver not really stopping to pick up any new passengers, it was hard to tell for sure. I got off at what I shakily identified as the fifth stop and found myself on a street whose purpose I couldn’t really identify. It was a long street that curved slightly, and there weren’t any shops, but it didn’t look residential either. Gray buildings—some of which, behind low walls, could have been apartment blocks, others with more obscure purposes—sat silently in the chilly night. I remember the high streetlamps and the limpid pools of light they formed on the sidewalk. I remember how quiet it was. I remember thinking that nothing in sight looked even remotely like a youth hostel.
I approached the closest building and looked at the address. I was in luck, it seemed; the number was 750 and the building I was looking for was at 752 (I’m probably not remembering the numbers correctly here, but you get the idea). I walked up to the next building—754. 754? Where was 752? I reversed course, wondering if there was just some oddity in the numbering system, but the next building down that direction was something like 740.
Where was 752?
In between 750 and 754 there was what appeared to be an alleyway or driveway. It was very dark and I didn’t want to go in, but what choice did I have?
So I went into the alleyway and walked until I hit a chain link fence, dimly illuminated by a security light. Somewhere beyond it, in the gloom, was a building of some sort. There was no visible means of entry, and as I approached it, I heard the sounds of dogs barking. They got louder, and it occurred to me that they were guard dogs, guarding whatever was behind that fence, which sure as hell wasn’t a youth hostel. I scurried out of the alleyway and back on to the street.
It was the middle of the night, in Krakow, and I had no idea where I was and a heavy bag on my back. If I couldn’t find the youth hostel I had no idea what my options were. I could try to walk back to the train station, but I was sure I would get lost. There were no businesses or no people in sight I could get any useful information from. If I couldn’t find this place, I was kind of fucked.
I looked around. I walked up and down the block, nervously, hungrily. And then I looked up; the ground ran at a slight slope up from the street here, a little grassy hill next to the building at 754. Having no other options, I walked up the hill.
At the top was what looked like an army barracks (it probably was), two long parallel one-story buildings. I pressed the buzzer and was let in; it was the hostel I was looking for, nearly empty. They let me into a long room, where a Japanese couple were playing cards. They sold no food at the hostel, but I managed to cadge some peanuts off the couple, who spoke no English. I went to bed hungry.
