Springfield. Or Leopoldov

Not everyone at Auschwitz was a dick. I met a very nice family from Canada at Oswiecim train station on the way to the camp, who ended up with the same tour guide as me and with whom I took the train back to Krakow afterwards. The local trains in that area of Poland are utter crap and worryingly ancient. With no apparent suspension and axle bearings made out of rocks, the trains jerk, judder and jump over every imperfection in the tracks and go painfully slow. What would be a 30 minute trip on a train back home was over 2 hours, and each of the 3 trains I caught were well over 15 minutes late getting to their destinations on top of that. Admittedly, some trains at home are pretty horrible, but most date from within the last 50 years at least and I'm not in constant fear that they're going to leave the tracks at any moment.

The train to Katowice, from where I was getting the overnight train to Bratislava, was horrendous. It was disgustingly hot and I sweated profusely throughout. It was rammed with backpackers and crawled through the countryside at a pace not even sufficient enough to get a good breeze through the windows. The overnight train wasn't much better, on which I shared a cabin with 5 drunk Dutch guys who proceeded to have a party in the corridor for most of the night. I had about 3 hours sleep.

I got to Bratislava at around half 5 in the morning. There really is nothing to do at that time here and, as I wasn't staying the night, I didn't have a hostel where I could at least sit until there was. I also felt pretty disgusting, having not been able to shower since the morning before, so tried to clean up as well as possible in the train station toilets. I know, yuck.

I wandered the Old Town for a few hours, which I assumed would be a lovely place to be once things opened, until it was time to get the train to Leopoldov, where I was staying with my friend Miriam and her family. The train was pretty swish and air conditioned, which was such a blessing after all the crap ones I'd been on in the last few days, and I even managed to grab a little snooze on the way. Miriam met me at the station. Eventually.

Leopoldov is a village of about 4000 people. Miriam took me on a bit of a walking tour through the town and the surrounding countryside to show me the sights; there's the nuclear power station about 20km away, the artificial lake which was once a gravel mine and now contains a dead horse and the maximum security prison for Slovakia's most extreme criminals. Go, it's really lovely.

We had a BBQ when we got back to the house, where her parents plied me with food and booze. I keep thinking about the smoked sausage wrapped in bacon they served and I want to cry. Neither of them or their friends that came speak English, which was a nice relief as I didn't have to pretend to be interesting for a few hours, and it was fun to just listen to the pattern of their conversation. After a shower, which I really didn't want to get out of, we headed to the local bar (a shack) to meet some of Miriam's friends and her brother. I don't quite know why we were drinking straight rum, but when two quadruples of that, a quadruple vodka and a beer costs 4 euros, you tend not to question things. It was much easier to talk to people there as everyone's English was pretty good, and I even got chatting to some people outside of Miriam's friendship circle; one guy, Michal, knew Slough because he used to visit his ex-girlfriend in Egham, 10 miles from home, when she was at university. Not something you expect to hear in a Slovakian village of 4000 people. It's a very small world.

Miriam's brother, Roman, and I headed home when the bar kicked out at God-knows-what-time; I'd been up for about 22 hours and desperately needed sleep. Miriam stayed out until 7am, drinking in a field. Classy girl. We sat outside in the morning chatting, recovering and eating watermelon. Hungarian watermelon, because apparently their climate is better for it. I put it off for as long as possible, as I didn't really want to go, but I had to man up and get the train back to Bratislava, so Miriam and I left a little earlier to take a leisurely stroll to the station in the sun. I'm sure she cried after I left.