10 Euros to Kraków: A Lamentation for my Bladder

You’ve probably heard that water is good for your health. I’m here to tell you: No. 

At least, not always. If you’re about to take a 10-euro, seven-hour bus ride across three countries, then avoid drinking water at all costs. If you drink water, you’ll probably need to empty your bladder. And when you go to empty your bladder, you might just find that the bus toilet is broken. And then you’ll be miserable. For hours. 

This is exactly what happened to me on a bus ride from Budapest to Kraków last month. Ninety euros cheaper than a flight. Six hours longer. Unlike on a plane, I could board the bus with unlimited liquids. And, my friends, therein lies the problem.

Prologue

I’ve taken a Megabus in the U.S. before. You can’t beat spending a few bucks to get from Kansas City to Chicago when you’re 22 years old and just out of college. And listen. It’s not all roses and rainbows. Has a man sitting in front of me spilled milk onto my belongings, and then decided not to clean it up? Of course. 

Have I seen a passenger, forgotten by the bus driver at a gas station during a bathroom break, run frantically across an overpass to back to the Megabus just before it turned onto the highway? Absolutely. 

Have I befriended a man named Matthew who was traveling across the country via bus to promote his self-published rap album “No Smilez” to an audience of Megabus passengers? Indeed. Did he describe in great detail how he could-have-been-a-big-NFL-football-star had he not constantly skipped school to have sex (which he then demonstrated with some all-too-realistic and unfortunate pumping actions)? Oh yes. Did he ask me about my astrological sign, and then call me a bitch when I said I was a Pisces? No doubt. And then did he forgive me for being a Pisces a few moments later? I’d like to think yes, but I can’t really remember. 

After about six years, the scars of that Megabus trip have finally healed. And, when I planned on traveling from Budapest to Poland to visit my family, I decided to avoid adding to my carbon footprint by taking a bus instead of a plane.

So, reader. Just for you. Here’s what happened on my latest budget travel experience.

Chapter 1. The passengers.

I can’t sleep on buses. Or planes. Or cars. So instead, as most other passengers fell asleep after we boarded in the pitch black darkness of 6 a.m., I listened. 

At first I heard mostly quiet. But a few people spoke in low voices. I tried to eavesdrop on what conversations I could hear, conversations in Polish and Hungarian and languages I couldn’t understand at all.

Then I heard a young German man shush them. “It’s still early in the morning,” he said in English, grumbling, although the people he scolded barely whispered. I remembered that just a few minutes earlier, this German man had kept two seats to himself on the crowded bus, not thinking to move when an Asian couple with a baby searched for a place to sit together. 

Now that couple and their baby sat in the back. The baby was quiet most of the way, but every so often broke out into singing “wee-oooh” and “woo-eeh.” I, not fluent in Baby Speak, could only imagine that the baby was saying, “Excuse me young German man, you seem to be very selfish and should probably consider the needs and wants of people around you, as this is a shared space, after all.”

I also saw two American girls who were clearly backpacking across Europe. They were dressed down, in leggings and glasses and messy buns, but one with the sort of giant, gaudy wristwatch that shouted “rob me!” These Americans had a certain look that I recognized from young Westerners who partied through countries like Hungary. Their clothing was expensive, but they wore it with laziness as if to say “I’m wealthier than you and I know it, and furthermore I don’t care.” 

Chapter 2. The toilet

About an hour into the trip, my bladder began begging me for a break. As I stood up to walk to the toilet underneath our seats, the girl sitting across the aisle put down her book and lightly touched my arm. 

“Just so you know,” she said. “It’s full of wee. And I couldn’t figure out how to flush it.” 

The problem was, of course, that I really had to go. So I sighed and walked down the steps to the tiny compartment posing as a bathroom that could barely fit five-foot-nothing little me. Just as the girl had warned, I found a toilet full of piss and toilet paper. I tried desperately to push the flush button Just as my new friend has said: no luck. Well, I thought. I’ll wait until the next pit stop. 

So I waited. The sun began to rise outside, and we crossed the border into Slovakia. I was temporarily distracted from my bladder’s pangs by the beautiful, heavy fog that spread across the countryside, nearly convincing me that we had driven into some iteration of the Forbidden Forest or Middle Earth. People started waking up and digging out their breakfasts. I smelled pungent onion. The American girls crunched their granola bars. 

Three hours after Budapest — two hours of doing everything in my power not to soil myself — we stopped at a bus stop somewhere in the middle of Slovakia. I wasn’t sure if it was just a passenger pickup stop or a bathroom break, but I didn’t care. 

I looked at my neighbor, the young woman who had warned me of toilet beforehand.

“I’m going to pee,” I said to this stranger.

“Do we have enough time to do that?” she asked. 

I shrugged, stood up, and walked to the bus driver. 

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I announced in Hungarian.

Without giving him a chance to say “No time!”, I sprinted off the bus and to the toilets. My friend-from-across-the-aisle ran only a few steps behind me. I kept thinking about the Megabus driver six years earlier in America who had left one passenger behind at a gas station. We finished business as fast as we could manage — sweet relief! — washed our hands, and then raced with wet hands back to the bus. 

“I think we were supposed to pay!” my friend said as we ran back to the bus. “There was a woman collecting coins!”

“Shit,” I said, then shouted “Sorry!” behind me in English, although we were already out of the small bathroom building. We got to the bus. It hadn’t abandoned us. Relief, again!

The bus driver frowned as we boarded, making sure to let us know that he was annoyed. I smiled at him, then cheerfully added “Köszönöm!” 

Chapter 3. The Sights

The bus took us through the Tatra Mountains, where my mother used to hike with her friends when she was even younger than I am now. I had never been.

This trip was in October, when the colors of the trees weren’t their brightest any more. Instead, I saw browns and dull reds and yellows, and some evergreens, and a few bare trees that had already dropped their leaves entirely. I could see steep triangle roofs on the hillside, all of different colors. 

At one point, I saw a castle on the side of the road. It wasn’t quite a ruin yet, built into rock and just existing as if it was another pointy-roofed house. There were no billboards with giant blinking letters, like you’d see on the way to Branson, Missouri. None of those ugly signs, one after the other, goading you with entertainers who seemed to be created in laboratories with too-bright smiles: COME COME COME!!! 

None of that in Europe, or at least in this part of Europe. No hideous billboards violating the countryside. Just houses and churches and trees and hills and castles, all hundreds of years old. Real castles. No manufactured fantasia here.

I turned to my new friend-in-toilet-hunting, who was also staring outside. 

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Nigeria,” she said. “But I live in Budapest.” 

“Oh, I’m going to see Chimamanda speak when I get to Kraków!” I told her, assuming that she’d know about the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “She’s giving a free talk tomorrow evening.”

And so, after bonding over emergency bladder relief, we talked about Chimamada and books in general and Kraków and Budapest and Nigeria and men who sold you self-published CDs while traveling on buses. When we finally arrived at the bus stop in Kraków — me, giddy with excitement to see this fairy tale city I had heard about from my mother — I grabbed my small suitcase and then looked for my new friend, wondering if she’d want to go to Chimamanda’s talk with me. But I couldn’t find her. She had already left.

There’s a certain camaraderie you develop with a person when you desperately need to find a toilet on a seven-hour bus ride. But I hadn’t even gotten the girl’s name. I sighed, mourning a friendship that could have been.

And then I bought a bottle of water. And found a toilet.