When nature calls, make sure you have change

As I stand at the top of the dimly lit stairs I find myself thinking twice before heading down. I stare at the dingy tiled walls and I think to myself that there is no way this can be accurate. But I have no choice. Nature calls. I walk down one flight, stop and look back, walk down another flight, again I question what I am doing, but forge ahead again tackling the last two flights of stairs until I’m in a hallway that looks more like an abandoned insane asylum than a hallway for the bathrooms.

I’m in the Krakow Glowny station waiting for a train to Budapest. It’s late at night and I’m in that weird time period where my train will arrive soon enough, but not soon enough to wait it out. Adding to the dilemma, I have no more zloty but I decide to take the chance to make my wait more comfortable. As I’m in Poland, I can’t judge another country’s lighting and decorative choices. I can’t tell if this is normal or not. I look around for an attendant and I see no one, so I enter the bathroom and it’s disgusting. No toilet paper, no paper towel, garbage on the floor. Again I think, can this be right? I peek my head back out the door into the hallway, nary a person in sight, I look for a table or a shelf with a tray of change, again nothing. I feel I have all the telltale signs that there is no way I have to pay to use this public toilet and march ahead.

As I head back into the hallway, a fluorescent light in the corner flickering on and off, a man comes out of nowhere screaming at me in Polish. I have no idea what he is saying or why he is so mad but when he grabs my arm a struggle ensues. Am I actually getting mugged at this moment? Who would even know I was down here in this leaky sub basement? We tussle back and forth, him trying to pull a ring off of my finger as I attempt to push him away. I scream in English as he screams in Polish and no one seems to hear us until I see out of the corner of my eye a woman. She’s coming down the stairs awful casually, but I feel a moment of relief that this will end soon with a witness around. With tussle still in full motion, the man takes one hand off of me and extends it to where the woman places change in his palm and walks away. And then it hits me, this is no mugger, this is the bathroom attendant.

With that, I was able to pull myself apart and run back up the stairs to civilization. It is from that moment on, I never go anywhere without some form of change in my pocket.