Buty Check
It was Monday the 17th of November when the first snowflakes of Winter 2010 fell upon Warsaw like so many grains of sand from the hands of Thor himself. Exactly two months to the day, it’s time to check out how my buty have fared in the snow, sludge, sand and salt.
Before:
After:
Unlike in the Just For Men Advert (TM) It'd be wrong to say the looks don't show on this shoe. (I've always found that advert strange. Who wants their Daughter bragging about their overnight transformation in hair colour? Surely it's a matter of total embarrassment requiring a minimum two week absence from work )The leather sheen has completely gone, not helped by my not bothering to use any kind of shoe polish on it - although what type of polish do you use on a light grey boot? I really don't know. Anyone know what kind of polish is appropriate in Polish? (Enough of that now). The stitching seems to have held (I usually brush it to get rid of the aggressive salt) but the laces are fading. I somehow doubt I'll be using these in three winter's time, which makes Pan Steeva's approach to buty a bit more logical. You live and learn. (I paid 300 pln+ for these)
Encounters with Kontrol
I was on Nowy Swiat today and finally had an encounter with Kontrol (ticket inspectors) - as I had a ticket there was nae bother. Unlike English buses, you're not required in Poland to show your ticket or swipe your card in front of the bus driver when entering the bus. This generally means boarding the bus is a lot quicker than in the UK as there's no hold ups at the one and only entrance.
On the other hand it does encourage fare-dodging. I now buy a weekly travel card for 32 pln as I am hopping about all over the city every day. I arrived on the 7th of October. If I hadn't bothered to pay for my travel up until the point when the ticket inspector would have caught me and issued a 100 pln fine (about £20 quid) I could have saved about 330 plnn - ironically about the price of my much faded boots.
But that's not the interesting part: I was surprised to see that out of the entire bendy-bus, just one customer didn't have the necessary ticket or validated travel card. For a system that is so obviously open to abuse that was quite a surprise.
Bonus Babcia/Tram Yeti
An excellent specimen with additional fur hat, spotted at the bottom of Nowy Swiat.
Paddy - the weekly round-up is a good idea. I thought I didn't miss a single one of your posts, but evidently I did.
ReplyDeleteWord of advice - buy a quarterly ZTM ticket. Best 196 złotys you can spend in Warsaw. A quarter's worth of weeklies sets you back 13 x 32 = 416 złotys.
Thanks, I didn't realise you could get a quarterly ticket. You found a million this week, I found 220!
ReplyDeleteI've been toying with a link to "continue reading" to reduce post sizes but that has always irritated me on the blogs I read. Reducing the font didn't seem like an option either and a round-up counts as a blog post as well!
I always buy tickets before I use the bus or tram, always... but a few weeks ago I'd bought a ticket but couldn't find it in my pockets full of crap and lint... so I got my mandat.
ReplyDeleteI've now learned to hold the ticket between my lips during journeys. That way it's harder to lose, although not impossible.