Standing on a train for 3 hours, building a snowman in Zakopane

Since it was our last weekend in Poland, we decided to go up to the Polish mountains last weekend. Our destination: a small town in the Tatras called "Zakopane." Since we wanted to get there early, we took a midnight train from the Warsaw Central station to Zakopane.

Unfortunately, since this was a night train, what would normally take 6 hours took more than 10 hours. The train passed by several other cities (Czestochowa, Katowice, Krakow, and a bunch of other smaller towns). Rowdy groups of men drank, smoked, and sang (it was actually more like "shouted") all night. Occasionally, they would also approach you and ask for beer money (in English - surprising!). Because we didn't have seat reservations (one of our companions insisted that it was not necessary), I spent the first 3 hours or so in the train seated in the hallway (my lucky trip buddies managed to get "proper" seats). As you can see below, Polish trains have very narrow hallways - I had to stand up whenever these rowdy men wanted to go to the bathroom (which happened every 5 mins or so).


As people slowly got off the trian after each stop, I was finally able to get a seat. However, as it turned out, these "proper" seats were not that much more comfortable than those hallway seats. Oh well, at least I didn't have to get up whenever someone passed by.


Zakopane is supposed to be a lot colder than Warsaw (on the average, about 6-7 degrees C colder) - something like Baguio is to Manila back in the Philippines. It certainly looks very cold in the pictures. Surprisingly though, even if the temperature was indeed lower when we visited, it didn't feel any colder there than in Warsaw. In fact, we even thought that the weather Warsaw felt a lot colder than Zakopane - something we attributed to more "wind chill" in the capital. Zakopane was cold - there was snow everywhere - but the wind wasn't constantly trying to freeze your nose off.

Filipinos would go up to Baguio to ride horses, eat Strawberries, and shop for souvenirs. Warszawians would go up to Zakopane to ski, eat Oscypek, and shop for souvenirs. Since skiing down a mountain to break some bones didn't really appeal that much to us, we decided to build a snowman instead.

Back at home when you go for a trip to the beach, building a big, nice looking sandcastle seemed like a piece of cake - I mean how hard could it be? Just stack up some sand and mud, use your Havaianas to round out and shape the edges - and BAM - you have a sandcastle. I figured the same should be true with snowmen (minus the Havaianas) - I mean how hard could it be, right? You just need to create 3 snowballs of different sizes, put them on top of each other, and BAM - you have a snowman.

Like building sandcastles, building snowmen was not as easy as it looked. Snow was hard to handle - primarily because it was heavy and cold. It was also hard to shape - it would turn rock solid quickly if you squeezed it too much. Our first attempt at building a snowman was pathetic. Really, really pathetic.

Then, we had a breakthrough. In cartoons, to create a big snowball (to presumably crush the kalaban), you first need to start with a small ball of snow. They would then push this ball down a slope, and it would gradually get bigger, and bigger, and bigger as it gathers more snow from the ground.

We tried this "cartoon theory" out in practice, and it worked! Snowballs really do grow like in the cartoons! As you can see below, we managed to create something that resembled a snowman (he looks like he got punched in the jaw by Manny Pacquiao). Success! Sort of, at least.

People who walked by took pictures of us building this thing ("Look at those silly Asians, trying to build a snowman in the park! There is dog shit everywhere! Ewww!").


The trip back to Warsaw was much faster - we decided to take a bus to Krakow (took 2 hours), and the express train to Warsaw (2 hours and 40 mins). This time, we made sure we had seats reserved. :)