Poland: Day 1

On the road again! And this time, Poland. This adventure actually took place two weeks ago (21-23, September 2012), but I was lazy to write about it. I will still keep the “1 day = 1 post” policy here.

Here’s our reasoning for going to Poland:

1. We should take advantage of the fact that everything in Europe is fairly close to us now
2. Since these are the last days of warmth, we should go somewhere that we can’t go later, when it’s too cold
3. So… eastern Europe, right?
4. Hey, why don’t we go to Poland and look for my great-grandparents’ graves?

And so, our three days vacation in Poland was on its way. Getting to Warsaw cheaply means flying with Wizz airlines. This means that rather than flying from Paris to Warsaw you fly from Beauvais to Modlin, and if you ask “where are those places?” my answer is “exactly”. So on a Friday evening Julia and I met after work on Gare Du Nord train station. Of course, we missed the express train to Beauvais, so we hopped on one train, then switched to another, and we found ourselves on a tighter schedule, but still in Beauvais.

Now getting to the airport itself, which was about a 15 minutes drive away – that turned out to be more complicated than expected. Outside the train station there’s a taxi stop, but no taxis stop at it, which makes it a very poor taxi stop. A bus that goes to the airport was scheduled to arrive five minutes after our flight leaves. We asked a policeman standing nearby for advice, and he just called, from his own phone, to the number listed on the taxi stop sign, but got no response. After a while, a New-Zealandic couple joined our efforts in, well, waiting, and we, in turn, actually started recognizing the fact that most chances are that we will, indeed, miss our flight. Suddenly, a car drove by, and the driver signaled us that he will pull over further down the road. As Julia and I started walking towards him, some random guy yelled at us not to go, pointing out that the dude is running an illegal taxi. “so what?” we asked. “Well, if you get into an accident then you’re not insured”. “Awesome!” Julia and I yelled and ran to the dude, leaving our new New-Zealandic (should I just say “very New-Zealandic” instead?) friends behind to rot. The dude turned to be a Moroccan, who in a mixture of French and Arabic expressed his disappointment of us for cutting it so close to the time of the departure. I, in return, expressed MY disappointment of him for driving so slow, and yelled at him “yalla, udrub!”. We got to the airport exactly half an hour before departure, just to discover that the flight was delayed an hour and half. As we were waiting we had dinner next to a guy that checked all the ring-tones in his phone. This piece of trivia will be important later on.

FYI: Flying Wizz airlines also means that your flying in a pink airplane, and that there are no reserved seats. You are basically seated like you would be on a bus. In Modlin airport we rented a car and drove to Warsaw. We checked in at a hotel that Julia booked for that night. Very quickly we were reminded where we actually are:

It was already getting late. We went for a walk and hit a cluster of three tiny bars in the outskirts of the city. Three drunk British kids greeted us and started giving us directions to all kinds of places that we weren’t intending to go to. We got a beer for me and a strange pink cider for Julia and went back to the hotel to get some sleep.