and if you wake up lonely…

Prague feels more like home this week because over the weekend I went to Krakow. It’s nice to come back to somewhere where I know ten words of the language instead of only two, and where it’s not quite so cold.

And by so cold, I mean so fucking cold. We found out only after we got there that it was the coldest weekend yet in Krakow, and Krakow is something like the Siberia of Poland. My face hurt. My toes froze through boots and two pairs of socks. When I breathed in, I felt my lungs prickle.

Backing up a little: we took the night train in. It’s about eight hours all told, and the train left at nine thirty, so we booked a sleeper car. I’d been in one once before, with my family, from St. Petersburg to Moscow. That time there were four bunks in a cabin only slightly bigger than a breadbox. This time, in about the same-sized cabin, there were six bunks stacked three high. We were a tangle of luggage and limbs.

Apparently now I’m afraid of most every type of mechanized transportation, because at night instead of falling asleep I looked out the window into the dark and the snow and thought about derailments. Somewhere around 2 a.m. we hit the Polish border, and it was revealed that one of our party had forgotten his passport. Long story short, none of the border patrolmen spoke English, but they managed to make it clear that he had to get off the train with gruff Polish and one young, dickhead-looking one’s mocking “hasta la vista.” So we left Morley at the Czech-Polish border in the early hours of the morning to wait alone with Polish guards for a train back to Prague that wouldn’t come for hours. Oops. He made it back okay, though, or so I’ve been told. I’ve yet to see him.

I stayed in a hostel with five people I knew, and twelve others were in a different hostel on the other side of the train station. I don’t want to map it out, because the specifics of the dynamic aren’t important unless you know these people and can gossip, but the point is this: after the other four in our hostel were closed in their rooms, I turned to Samia and asked, “Are you drowning in the social politics, too, or is it just me?” And she burst out laughing because it was not just me at all.

There were times when it was made clear that a group of friends was already established and no one else was welcome to join them for breakfast. There were times when we were not too subtly blown off before we’d expressed any sort of interest in joining. There were times when we all knew we were going to end up in the same place, and the most acknowledgment we got was “I guess we’ll see you on the tour, or something.” There was fucking who sits where on the bus drama.

And I was half amused and half completely confused because Christ, I haven’t had to deal with this shit since middle school. Bus drama? I guess I thought it had disappeared with age, but apparently I’d only escaped it because I went to a big, impersonal university in a big, impersonal city, and I’m friends with people because I actually like them and not because there aren’t that many other people around. Now I’m in a program of only a hundred, and maybe thirty of those hundred are male, and the people I socialize with are the same people I attend classes with, and it’s been three weeks and it’s already inbred and frustrated and uncomfortable.

The difference between now and middle school–which is a comparison that, at age twenty, I cannot believe I have to draw–is that now I respond with more detached wonder than intense self-hatred. Which doesn’t mean I don’t mind at all; I can’t say it doesn’t sting when someone looks into a train compartment in which Samia, Tara and I are sitting with three empty seats, then turns back and asks, “which other seats do we have?” But I can also recognize that it’s their problem, not mine, if it’s too frightening to sit with someone they don’t already have an affectionate nickname for. And I can make sarcastic comments about it to Samia, who is nice, instead of sitting alone and lamenting the fact that I’m a social pariah. Because I’m not, as I remembered when I returned to Prague and people who hadn’t come to Krakow expressed actual excitement to see me. Imagine it.

But anyhow. Ridiculous adolescent passive-aggressive drama aside. Krakow is beautiful. And cold. Did I say cold? Warsaw was systematically bombed to shit by the Nazis, but Krakow wasn’t, so lots of it is still old and intricate and cobblestoned. Polish is even more incomprehensible than Czech, at least in spelling: “thank you” sounds about the same in both languages, but in Polish they throw in a Z. A street we walked on a bunch of times was called Szpitalna, or, as I liked to call it, “Suhzuhplthhffkdf.” (Back in Prague, I read my sister the spelling over the phone and asked her how she’d say it. She replied, “unhuhghnfnhmm.” This is why we are sisters.)

There’s a castle in Krakow, because there’s a castle in every city in Europe, apparently. (“We’re up to here in fuckin’ castles!” -Eddie Izzard). So we saw the castle, and the cathedral that comes with the castle. We went to the Jewish quarter as well, but it was Saturday, so lots of things were closed and the market was empty. We went to a cafe and drank tea and ate dessert.

Because it was so cold out, we patronized lots of cafes and drank lots of tea and ate lots of dessert. And pierogie. And goulash with meatballs and borscht with dumplings and tomato soup and more dessert and black currant juice and croissants and cream cheese which comes in a giant glass with big radish slices arranged in a circle around the top. And bagels they sell on the street for one zlotschkrutilskdhk. (I still don’t really know what their money is called. But one is about thirty cents.) I’m not allowed to eat for a week.

[I had more to say than I thought, so I’ll split this in half Bernard-style.]