From Warsaw to Łódź to London then back again

Tomorrow I am taking the train to Łódź from Warsaw to get a Ryanair flight back to England for, unfortunately, a funeral.

I now approach Ryanair flights with a sense of ever-increasing dread. I have used them about 15 times in the past because they are the only London carrier to fly to Wrocław. I have also used Easyjet, Aer Lingus and BA to fly to Poland previously and in comparison they feel like travelling on a 1920s train in First Class with your butler on hand for attendant requests and to help unload the baggage. 

First of all, Ryanair’s policy of no seat allocation is very cleverly designed to speed up passengers’ boarding of the plane. In a “please-God-don’t-let-me-have-to-sit-next-to-that-drunk-nutter-talking-to-himself-by-the-Duty-Free-section” mass hysteria sort of way. I remember once I decided, sod it, I will take pot luck and turn up with 20 minutes to go. The end result was I spent 2 hours sitting next to two enormous Lech Poznan fans practically crushing me to death with their overtly enormous thigh jambons and bulging biceps. Perfectly polite guys but not designed for the seats.

So now I’m just as guilty as the next passenger of rushing to queue as early as possible to bag a seat in my preferred area. It makes the queuing system as panicky and stressful as it possibly can be. And this is Polish queuing we’re talking about! If there were prizes for badly organised queuing systems, the Poles would certainly be up there with the best of them. I remember once in Carrefour I had just had eye surgery and my eyes were almost completely bloodshot. In the line ahead of us for vodka a woman dropped a bottle. Under the cover of the confusion a middle aged guy tried to push ahead of me. One flash of my blood drenched eyeballs and he was straight to the back! Sadly, for this purpose, my eyes are no longer bloodshot...

That aside, there’s then the relentless chirpy Irish voice informing you of all manner of amazing offers, like nicotine-less cigarettes, wonderful scratchcards with a lorra-lorra prizes, duty free perfume and sandwiches and coffee in promotion with Starbucks (TM). It never stops. It is never less than chirpy and quirky (contrast that to their complaints line, which has its telephone exchange point somewhere near the River Styx) and thus bloody infuriating.

Then without fail all passengers will applaud the landing of the plane as if we've just survived it on one wheel, with a flaming engine and still jinking to avoid the ME 109s trailing us all the way home. You don't clap the bus driver or taxi driver when they park, do you?! Even though both those forms of transport are statistically more dangerous than flying. It's not like the pilots slump over the control stick the minute they've landed, release the grip on their rosaries and praise Shiva to the rooftops, satisfied only when they hear mute applause from behind them and they're handed a handkerchief to mop their sweaty brow. 

All that said I am looking forward to spending a bit of time exploring Łódź, the historical centre of the Polish textiles industry and now an important distribution point being as it is roughly in the centre of Poland, and its main street ul. Fabryczna which has been redeveloped over recent years and now, to me anyway, resembles San Francisc in some way. More on Łódź's development is available here.

In some respects I am wary of returning to the UK. I am now used to speaking and thinking as much as possible in Polish, in managing Polish bus routes and being surrounded by Poles chattering away. Acclimatised you might say. This little studio flat in our biscuit-brown Klatka in Ursynów feels like home now.  

Perhaps I’m a little nervous I might not want to return to Poland at the end of this trip. Or that England will feel strange and unfamiliar and unwelcome. I have been here just under 6 weeks now and this is not one of the emotions I was expecting to go through.

The price of entrusting my life to Michael O'Leary and his Band of Merry Men is that blogging will be as Tomasz Schafernaker predicted earlier this week (see guest post on Friday).