e.silver
28.11.02, 16:14
Poniższy tekst jest z przyczyn oczywistych dedykowany Biedronce :)))
By Wuqiang Yang, 30 September 2002
I was going to attend a conference in Wroclaw in Poland. Do
you know this city? You may say "Oh, I know. It must be the Poland capital
city. I did wonder the different spellings between Warsaw and Wroclaw, but
I believed that they are the same city.
Together with a lecturer from Lancaster University for the
same conference,I landed in Warsaw airport at 10.00 pm and then we tried to
find somebody from the conference who might wait for us. It appeared that
nobody was meeting us. A taxi driver came to help. When we showed the
conference place,he said "No Warsaw, no Warsaw. 400 km away is Wroclaw" (I
know in Russian, "ne" means "not", but "net" means "no"). We thought that he
must be cheating us.
We went to another taxi. The taxi driver seemed that he
knew the place very well and he was very "happy" to take us to Polytechnique.
We arrived at Polytechnique, but the taxi driver said "I cannot find
building A4". In the end all of us agreed that we had been a wrong city. The
first taxi driver was right. Wroclaw is 400 km away.
We worried what we should do. The taxi driver said "If you pay
2500 zl(about 500 pounds), I can drive you to Wroclaw overnight". We
did consider hiring a car and spending 4 hours to drive to Wroclaw.
Unfortunately, we both did not take our driving licenses with us and
fortunately, we were not able to hire a car. Otherwise, we had to drive 9
hours from Warsaw to Wroclaw because there is no motorway between the 1st
largest and the 4th largest cities in Poland. In the end, we decided to go
back to the airport.
It was too late. The airport was closed. My colleague suggested sitting in
airport overnight. I preferred finding a small hotel rather
than sitting there overnight like a homeless. It was nearly midnight. We
called a taxi again. He drove us to a nearby hotel. It costs 130 Euro per
person per night. As poor academics, we do not want to spend so much our
research reserves for a few hours sleep. The taxi driver said that he
could find a cheap hotel, but needed 15 minutes driving. Eventually, we
found a small hotel. We paid 130 zl for two, but we paid 75 zl to the taxi
driver. It has been confirmed later that we paid double price to the taxi.
Next early morning at 5.00 o'clock, we went to Warsaw airport
and flew to Wroclaw at an additional cost of 960 zl each ticket.
Fortunately, we arrived at the conference only one hour late. However, the
conference organiser said that he had been waiting for us at Wroclaw airport
until midnight and suddenly realised that we must have gone to a wrong city.
Now I can remember Wroclaw is Vrorzwarv, a beautiful old city
with 112 bridges and more than 100 churches near Germany, but not
Warsaw.