Travel to Krakow, Poland – Episode 185 Transcript

Travel to Krakow, Poland – Episode 185 Transcript

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Chris: Oh my.

Raul: Yeah, it is a fantastic experience. Now that’s a key one.

Chris: Now you took public transportation out there or you took a tour there?

Raul: We totally did it on our own and to go to the salt mines it was a bus but it depended on the place and the recommendation. Like Auschwitz, which is another side trip I’ll tell you about, you have the option of train or bus. But through research, you find out that if you take the train it’ll take you 2.5 hours but if you take a bus, it will be a lot quicker than that. There’s a certain requirement for the timing because there’s a movie at eleven, at least at the time I went, that gives you an overview and if you take the train you might miss the start of the movie because the train only leaves at a certain time. To go to Wadowice where John Paul was born, for example, the train was not working or at least at that time of the year it wasn’t working so we ended up taking a mini van, one of those private vehicles.

Chris: Sure.

Raul: Which was it’s own experience because I didn’t know how to tell the driver to stop or where to stop because I had no idea where I was going. That’s why learning some Polish ahead of time helped me to say the pleasantries and have people want to help me out.

Chris: After you were done with the pleasantries, how easy was it to make yourself understood if you had to resort to English?

Raul: I don’t know if I am making this up in my mind or not but there seem to be a generational divide as to whether people would speak English or not.

Chris: Sure. Very typical.

Raul: It makes some sense. Right if you see people 40 or older who maybe were learning German or Russian as their second language but I found that true in surprisingly at train stations. The ladies who were working behind the windows at any train station in Warsaw or in Krakow at least they never spoke English to me. Whether they were shy or didn’t speak it, I don’t know. But I had to use Polish to ask for my tickets and questions of fares and things like that because they were not upfront in talking English to me. And then when the people were younger, I never had any issue with people speaking any English.

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