July 8 - 10, 2019
Belgrade to Warsaw and back
It’s Wednesday afternoon. After having left them in Berlin more than four weeks ago, and now having traveled for over 48 hours, four bedraggled but critical bike suitcases are with us. I was convinced numerous times that the “rescue mission” wasn’t going to pan out, but in the end, success!
I left Meg and the kiddos at 3:30 on Monday afternoon for my taxi ride to the airport. Check-in and security were fine, so I spent an hour or more at the gate writing some long overdue emails. I was surprised o hear more and more people continue crowding into the small room. I hit send and looked at my watch to see it was already thirty minutes after our departure time. I was momentarily panicked, convinced I had obviously sat through the actual boarding and was now surrounded with passengers anxiously awaiting a flight to somewhere I emphatically did not want to go! Thankfully, it turned out to be an ordinary flight delay. The first leg, to Sweden, was two hours.
My unwarranted alarm turned out to be justified once we landed in Malmö, Sweden and I found myself in the passport control line now with only 20 minutes before the flight departure to Warsaw. I literally ran through baggage claim, through the Nothing-to-Declare gate, and weaved through the corrals leading to the security desk. Malmö, fortunately, is a tiny airport, and I was the only one in the security line, which, in this case, was only somewhat comforting. My trusty Swiss Army knife (number three-hundred and ninety-seven), which had accompanied me since Berlin was declared short enough to pass through security in Belgrade, but had apparently grown a few millimeters on the flight, so was now too long to fly on. I waved it off and ran to the gate, and down the gangway happily joining the other passengers, already on board.
As I had suspected might be the case, my Serbian SIM card did not work in Poland. I cleverly swapped in my Hungarian SIM card (Hungary and Poland are both EU countries) but was surprised to see an entry code required. Arrrgh. Whatever paperwork I had gotten with the Hungarian SIM was long since gone. Note for the future….
View over Warsaw
The next morning, I simply had the concierge at the hotel place a call to my contact, Denis Petryakov, at the shipping warehouse. I confirmed the company name and address — TMM Express, 3 Maja 8, Budynek (building) A3 — and then used the hotel WiFi to order an Uber. Minor panic number three occurred after I was dropped off at the address. Twenty minutes later, I was still walking in larger and larger circles from the given address. It turned out there is more than one 3 Maja 8. The first is a small brick building, the second is an entire complex of warehouses around the corner and past a security gate. Of course, I couldn’t just call Denis without cell service, and the security guard I found to ask simply waved me on with a torrent of Polish. I eventually noticed large badges on the corners of the warehouses, A1, A2, B3… A quarter-mile down the road I happily found the TMM Express warehouse.
Not the 3 Maja 8 I needed
Entrance to the warehouse... locked, of course
Once let into the building, I was taken to Denis. He was pleasant and immediately led me to the bags sitting in a clean and absolutely cavernous warehouse. I was concerned there were going to be problems when Denis was pulled away by a colleague heatedly pointing to some paperwork. In the end, I simply signed and dated. Denis let me use his phone’s WiFi hotspot to order an Uber, a “Van” this time, just to make sure everything would fit. I pulled the cases outside and confirmed my pickup location when Denis informed me that the Uber might not be able to pick me up on this side of the security gate. Doh! Ok, not a problem. Now, I just need to move these four cases three blocks down the road… in the next two minutes! Minor panic number five!
I manically began duct taping suitcases together in two groups. I knew I’d be able to wheel two cases at once, but never four — two cases on the ground, two piggybacked on top. I frantically ran down the sidewalk, hopping on and off curbs, and back to the security hut. Luckily, I spied the black, Renault, mini-wagon with the correct license plate just as it passed. He heard my yell, flipped a “U”ey, and helped me pile the suitcases in back… just before it started to rain. Success!
For the rest of the day, after stashing the bags at the hotel, I headed off to the Warsaw Uprising Museum…. which is closed on Tuesdays. Change of plans, I bought a 24 hr metro pass and headed into the old town. Somehow I had never realized how devastated Warsaw was during the war. Between occupation by both Germany and Russia, Poland really suffered. One chart I saw showed the Warsaw population dropping by 85% during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, from over 1,000,000 to 160,000! Of course, a huge number of those were exterminated Jews.
Old Town Square
Warsaw population over time
English is nowhere near as commonly spoken in Poland as in the other countries we’ve been to. Perhaps there is less tourism plus there are just a lot more native Polish speakers compared to smaller countries like Hungary or Czechia. This and the fact that I can’t get service on my phone made it much harder to get around and figure things out. Fortunately, GPS works no matter what, so Google maps always showed a position for me on the map. However, searching and getting directions were kaput. To get back to the hotel I just improvised taking trams and busses as long as they went in the direction I needed to go.
All that was left of the rescue mission was to get all four bags onto the two buses back to Belgrade. Minor panic number five occurred when, fifteen minutes before the scheduled 10 p.m. departure, the bus still hadn’t appeared. Never fear. A very clean, modern, FlixBus showed up a few minutes later. No one even gave me a second glance as I shoved the cases into the storage compartment and climbed aboard.
The next morning, bleary-eyed from a restless night’s sleep, I glanced at my phone an hour after our brief stop in Bratislava to see that we made it all the way to Budapest. I’d get a two-hour rest stop and a chance to eat before boarding a second bus for the final leg back to Belgrade. The bus pulled away as I shoved the cases onto the sidewalk and looked at my watch… 9:30 a.m. Ohh, no! We weren’t supposed to get to Budapest— the Nepliget station in Budapest — until 10:00! I had just gotten off at the wrong station! Argh. Panic session number six!
The good news was, according to my phone, that I was definitely in Budapest, even if I was at the wrong station. And, I had over two hours to figure it out. The gods were smiling on me because the woman at the information desk simply looked at the ticket and told me to go down the street and take the metro. I still had Hungarian forints with me to ease the process. A frantic fifty minutes later, after a few staircases, two metro trains, and a bus, I, and the suitcases, were where we needed to be. Disaster adverted!
Frantic metro ride
Whew! Budapest bus to Belgrade
Meg and the kids were waiting for me at the Belgrade bus station when I finally arrived around 7:00. It was fantastic to see their smiling faces and have a few extra hands to maneuver the luggage. To celebrate, surprise, we went out to dinner. Vietnamese food. Mission accomplished.
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