A Series of Unfortunate Events

The first post of 2008 and one of my new year's resolutions is going well. I hope I can continue to write more regularly on my blog. Christmas was nice for me, I spent a traditional Christmas at Kasia's house and then travelled to Scotland on boxing day to spend a few days there with my family. I even managed to get home yesterday in time to have a wee hogmany party in my flat. All in all, everything went fine. So why the title? When are we going to hear about these unfortunate events? Well the title is a description of my journey back from Scotland to Poland with the wonderful Wizzair and via Katowice airport. I have actually thought of writing about Katowice airport before, due to the fact that every time I have been there something has annoyed me. Well this time was no exception. Anyone who has flown with Wizzair or even Ryanair for that matter, will know that they never take you where you actually want to go. They don't fly you to Glasgow but to Prestwick, not to London but Luton or Stansted, not Barcelona but Girona and with Wizzair, not Krakow but Katowice. Well this is annoying but usually there is a connection available to where you want to go. The Wizzair connection is a wee miny van. So we arrived at Katowice airport at 1.30 am, expecting to catch this van to Krakow. So there we were, waiting outside in the cold with four other people for this van. Time went on and there was no sign of the van. We asked at the information desk in the airport, but the ladies working there didn't know if it was turning up. Point number one for Wizzair and Katowice airport, communicate better!! What is the point in having an information desk about the airport if the people working there don't know pretty simple information like when a bus will arrive? Eventually we were told that the bus would arrive when two other flights had landed. This meant the bus would be there around 3 am. So we waited and at 3 am the bus arrived. The only trouble was that the driver informed us that most of the seats were reserved and there were only two spaces available. As I said earlier, there were 6 of us waiting for this bus. So here we were, 6 people, tired, cold, wanting to go to Krakow and only two spaces on the bus. Point number two, costumer service. This bus driver was probably the rudest guy I have met and had absolutely no advice for any of us on how to get back to Krakow. Eventually a decision was taken to let two Scottish girls take the seats and we took another bus to Katowice train station to try to catch the first train to Krakow which left at 4.20 am. So we took the 40 minute bus ride to the train station. Now if anyone reading has been to Katowice train station then you will know that it is not the prettiest place in the world. When we arrived at the station, thinking we had missed the train, we were told that it had been delayed and we had 20 minutes left to catch it. Great !! A piece of luck at last!! Well not exactly. The woman working at the ticket sales desk worked as quickly as a woman in the Polish post office and despite there only being one person in front of us in the queue, it took a good 10-15 minutes to get out ticket. However once that was done, she told us to go to platform 4 and wait for the train. After waiting at platform four for a while, there was no sign of a train for Krakow. It was almost 5.30 am when the woman announced that the train would be leaving from platform two. It seems that Katowice train station has a similar communication problem. So it was off to platform two, running with our suitcases. Well eventually we made it and got onto the train, arriving in Krakow at around 7.30 am. The moral of this story is try to avoid Katowice airport and train station. Not the best situation considering that Katowice will be used during Euro 2012.