On Tuesday I spent part of the morning in Couchsurfing.com trying to confirm a place to stay in Krakow getting a confirmation from Mlynek to stay at his place for two nights. Later on I walked around Old Riga taking pictures, buying some snacks in the Supermarket and looking for a traditional linen Latvian shirt. I found the shirt in a small souvenir store I saw several times but I did not pay too much attention to it because it was so small and at the end of a small alley. Finally I decided to walk to the bus station to find the best route to go in the afternoon to take the bus to Poland.

In the afternoon it took few minutes to walk from Jeivgenija’s place to the bus station. I got there at 5:30 going directly to the ramp number 1 where the bus was supposed to arrive. I met a girl from Australia and a guy from Beijing, both of them traveling Europe alone and going on that day to Vilnius, Lithuania. Several people mentioned before how beautiful is Vilnius but I decided not to stop there on this occasion and I was tempted to do it but I wanted to spend more time in Poland.

The bus was a two floors vehicle and with very comfortable seats. The travel from Riga to Krakow was in time something similar to the travel from Panama City to San Jose, Costa Rica, so I was not worried about the time being use to this kind of long travels.

The bus made several short stops in the way not stopping in the border between Latvia and Lithuania. Actually I never noticed when we crossed that border. In the other hand the bus made a stop in the border with Poland.

Normally policemen at borders are not the best very well informed people, considering this I printed the list of countries that does not need visa for each of the visited countries on this travel. In the border between Lithuania and Poland policemen checked the passengers id’s and passports, when I saw the officer looking my passport flipping the pages I just presented to him the page I printed from the Poland’s Foreign Affairs Ministry with the list of countries who does not need a visa, including Panama. He did not say anything and returned back my passport without any inconvenience.

The bus arrived almost two hours late to Krakow. The bus was supposed to arrive at 12:25 pm and it arrived at 2:00 pm. Mlynek’s wife was waiting for me and she left but I borrowed somebody’s cell phone at the bus station to call her and she said she was going to come back to pick me up.

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