G’day Gdansk

We’ve left Lodz behind for Gdansk, a city with a historic centre not unlike Wroclaw and a hundred other such European towns. This is our final few days of travel before settling down in Warsaw by the end of the week. And today’s five hours of Polish train travel will make that feel all the better. Most (but not all) of the trains in Poland are old – dating to at least the eighties and probably the seventies. They still go fast but seating is arranged in old-fashioned carriages, rather than by rows resembling a bus – as is normal in Western Europe.

The carriages contain eight seats, two rows of four facing each other. There is storage overhead that is not nearly enough when two passengers have huge backpacks and the other six have varying degrees of luggage. Still, it’s not too bad, compared to what it could be; on buses in Warsaw and trains in Western Europe, there is always the one section of seating with two rows of two seats facing each other. Whoever designed this should be made to sit in one of these rows for four hours with three sweaty, overweight passengers who think they aren’t nearly as large as they really are.

I’ve never been in this situation, but no matter who is sitting opposite you on these buses or trains, there is never enough footroom. (Except on the Polish trains, which is what makes the experience not nearly as bad as it could be.) Combined that with the awkward attempt one has to make to look anywhere but straight ahead and, as I said, whoever designed the concept should be subjected to it.