Robbery and Conspiracy

So this is going to be a sad sad story. On the night of May 25th, Shane, Theresa, Lone and I boarded the train to Budapest. We all sat in the same cabin so we could keep each other company, and since we had heard horror stories about night trains being dangerous, we thought, "safety in numbers."

Before I tell about our ordeal, let me give you a little insight about Eastern European trains. First of all, they are really bad (we didn't really figure this out until a week later when we took our first train in Italy and realized how nice they were.) Also, for every country you enter and exit while on the train, a few things happen. First, the passport control officer comes by to stamp your passport to show that you are leaving one country. Then, a conductor comes by to check your ticket. Next, another passport control officer comes by to stamp your passport to show that you are entering another country. So, basically, you don't really get any sleep, because every 30 min. or so, someone is knocking on your door asking for something.

So, we had been on the train for about 6 hours and we had had multiple knocks on the door to check our tickets and passports. It was the wee hours of the morning by then and we were all half asleep and half awake. A woman knocked on our door and asked to see our tickets, so we showed them. About 5 mins. later, another man came by and asked to see our tickets, so we showed them. Then, he started telling Shane and I that we had to move (keep in mind this was in extremely broken English and we were half asleep.) We finally figured out that he was telling us that we were in 1st class (we didn't know) and our tickets were 2nd class tickets, so we needed to move to 2nd class. Of course, he didn't tell us where 2nd class was, so Shane and I gathered up our packs and started walking in the direction he had motioned towards. We passed through a couple cars, and finally another conductor stoped us and told us to go the other way, because we were about to enter the sleeping car. So, we turned around (which is quite difficult in a train corridor with our huge packs.) We started walking back the way we came, and finally someone motioned us into a cabin. We went in and put our big packs on the racks above our heads. I laid down on one bench using my small day pack as a pillow, and Shane sat up and put his headphones on to listen to some music. He had his day pack propped up against him. About 10 min. later, I woke up quickly when Shane shouted, "my bag is gone!!!" We were stunned. Shane had just closed his eyes for a min. and we had the door to our cabin shut. Someone had opened our door, walked right in and took Shane's bag. He started walking up and down the train (after almost punching out the window of course) and found the bag 2 cabins down sitting on a bench. The only thing missing was his camera and the little bit of Polish money that was in his wallet. They had left the cell phone, his sunglasses and all his credit cards. Luckily, all our documents were in my pack.

About 10 mins. later, Theresa walked in and said they had been robbed too. Now, to try to explain how these cabins are set up, imagine 3 seats on each side of a small room and they face each other. The seats slide down and meet up with the one opposite it to make a bed. So, in each cabin, there are a total of 6 seats, that make 3 beds. The girls had been sleep on the two beds closest to the door (so really they were blocking their door) and they had their purses by the window on the opposite end from the door. Someone had climbed over them in their sleep and taken their bags. The didn't realize it until 2 conductors woke them up and had their purses in their hands. The conductors said they had found the purses in the bathroom and identified the girls from their passports. The girls were not as fortunate as us. They lost both their cameras, cell phones, video camera and credit cards.

When Theresa came to our cabin and told us this, we were shocked. A conductor came with her and we told him we had been robbed too. He told us the only thing we could do was to get of the train right then and go file a police report with the Slovakian police (we were passing through Slovakia) and that the Hungarian police could do nothing for us if we waited to file a report. Now, seeing as how it was around 3 in the morning, we were not about to get off that train in the middle of Slovakia. So, he told Shane and I to move back to the orginal (1st class) cabin. We started asking around the train to the few people who were onboard, and it turned out that the 4 of us were the ONLY ones who had been robbed. Later, we would put it all together and figure out that it had all been a set up and that the "conductor" who made Shane and I move was either 1. not a conductor (we had never seen him before and never saw him again) or 2. the conductors were in on the scam. Hindsight is always 20/20 I suppose. We didn't now any better than to follow what the conductor told us. Often, trains split apart at certain points and half goes one way and the other half goes another way, so we always do what they tell us.

So, Shane's camera was gone and that was not such a big deal, but we also lost a lot of pictures from Ireland and all the ones from Prague.