Eastern European tour: Day 1 Jena-Krakow

To help deal with the overwhelming amount of pictures and information, we've decided to break our vacation up into days. This makes the first post rather boring, however, since it was almost entirely a travel day. We left Jena at 8:45 am, and didn't arrive in Krakow until around 9:30 pm after taking four trains. We also have almost only a few pictures from this day, including this young traveller waiting on the platform in Großheringen, just north of Jena, who looked as if he were heading out on a round-the-world tour by himself.

The train left a bit before Béla's usual waking time, so we were packed and ready to leave while he was still sound asleep. So we wrapped him in a blanket and got him into the stroller without waking him up, and he only woke later to find himself without any pants on, waiting on a train platform. He took this all in stride of course, which I don't think I would, in his position.
This was our first train of the day, which had a small-child-compartment, in which we found a sleeping train employee, which was sort of unusual. You can see him there in the background, after he woke up. (Usually this compartment is only for families with small kids.)
Overall the day went off without a hitch, which is all you can ask of a travel day. We had an hour to kill in Berlin so we had a nice picnic in a park near the train station inside old prison walls. From there we were on a train to Warsaw, of which we saw only the rather grim train station as we ran for a tight connection to Krakow. This train was by far the worst of our trip, though we didn't know it at the time. Everyone had warned us about the poor quality of eastern European trains, but this was really the only train that seemed unusually bad. I've never been in such a noisy train, and when it went over certain sections of track it shook back and forth so violently that you had to hold on. It's hard to explain just how rough a ride it was. (Béla found it exciting, after he woke from a long nap during which the rocking and vibrations seemed to help him sleep.) We'll tell you more about Krakow in our next post.