Yöllisiä...
En jaksa selittää samaa tarinaa uudestaan, joten leikkeen alla viimeöinen seikkailuni Mikkolassa.
Tuesday, April 18
Due to my own stupidity...
The trains were pretty packed last night, so I ended up taking one which arrived here a little bit past 11 PM. My local train connection went almost an hour later, so I figured I'd just grab a cab and be home well before midnight... Well, turns out there was a pretty long queue at the taxi stop, so I checked if by any chance there was going to be any buses I could take to get a little closer to home. Yes! There was a bus leaving in ten minutes which would take me to my local train station, and I could just take a cab home from there instead. So I hopped on. Phased out.
Looked around a little bit later and realised - fuck - the bus didn't go to where I thought it would. The bus driver threw me out in the middle of some godforsaken residential area.
"Do you have a number for a taxi?" I asked.
"No." He said.
"Uh, okay. Where am I?"
"Mikkola," he said and indicated I should get the hell off his bus.
"Right. Nice. Thank you." Well, it wasn't his fault I ended up in the wrong part of town in the middle of the night.
Luckily we'd passed a petrol station a few stops ago, so I picked up my bag and started tracing my way back. It wasn't so bad, really - the night wasn't too cold, my bag wasn't too heavy, I wasn't in any hurry, and I pretty much knew where I was - except for giving myself a good talking-to for not checking where the bus was actually headed. I considered briefly if I should just walk home, but it was a pretty long and dark stretch of road to walk in the middle of the night. Maybe if I hadn't had my bag with me.
So I arrive at the petrol station (a lonely building awash in orange and yellow lights with actually pretty good music blaring out of the speakers) and asked the attendant for a taxi number, only to find out my phone ran out of credit right then. Great. The petrol station didn't stock any card-thingies to load credit on the phone so he ended up calling a cab for me and even deducted a euro from the usual fee because I'd actually made an attempt to call one myself.
I waited outside for ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. He came outside to check if the taxi really hadn't arrived yet. Half an hour - the attendant called the taxi company to check if they still had the booking, which they did. Forty minutes. I noticed I could have taken that bus just driving past the stop over there and would have been home within ten minutes - if I'd been so clever as to have checked the bus schedule at the stop as I walked past it some time earlier. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Fifty minutes. A taxi drives to the station, but turns conspiciously and stops on the side of the building. I walked over and the driver looked a little perplexed at my appearance.
"Uh, you're not the taxi I booked, are you?" I asked, somewhat bereft of hope this might be so. He confirmed my doubts and we had a little chat - he was just off duty, and he was going to get his car washed, but if my taxi hadn't arrived by then he offered to drive me home free of charge, since he was heading that way anyway. Nice!
Five minutes later my taxi arrived and took me home. Ten euros for a five minute drive... But I got home eventually. A little wiser even, perhaps.
*
Tuesday, April 18
Due to my own stupidity...
The trains were pretty packed last night, so I ended up taking one which arrived here a little bit past 11 PM. My local train connection went almost an hour later, so I figured I'd just grab a cab and be home well before midnight... Well, turns out there was a pretty long queue at the taxi stop, so I checked if by any chance there was going to be any buses I could take to get a little closer to home. Yes! There was a bus leaving in ten minutes which would take me to my local train station, and I could just take a cab home from there instead. So I hopped on. Phased out.
Looked around a little bit later and realised - fuck - the bus didn't go to where I thought it would. The bus driver threw me out in the middle of some godforsaken residential area.
"Do you have a number for a taxi?" I asked.
"No." He said.
"Uh, okay. Where am I?"
"Mikkola," he said and indicated I should get the hell off his bus.
"Right. Nice. Thank you." Well, it wasn't his fault I ended up in the wrong part of town in the middle of the night.
Luckily we'd passed a petrol station a few stops ago, so I picked up my bag and started tracing my way back. It wasn't so bad, really - the night wasn't too cold, my bag wasn't too heavy, I wasn't in any hurry, and I pretty much knew where I was - except for giving myself a good talking-to for not checking where the bus was actually headed. I considered briefly if I should just walk home, but it was a pretty long and dark stretch of road to walk in the middle of the night. Maybe if I hadn't had my bag with me.
So I arrive at the petrol station (a lonely building awash in orange and yellow lights with actually pretty good music blaring out of the speakers) and asked the attendant for a taxi number, only to find out my phone ran out of credit right then. Great. The petrol station didn't stock any card-thingies to load credit on the phone so he ended up calling a cab for me and even deducted a euro from the usual fee because I'd actually made an attempt to call one myself.
I waited outside for ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. He came outside to check if the taxi really hadn't arrived yet. Half an hour - the attendant called the taxi company to check if they still had the booking, which they did. Forty minutes. I noticed I could have taken that bus just driving past the stop over there and would have been home within ten minutes - if I'd been so clever as to have checked the bus schedule at the stop as I walked past it some time earlier. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Fifty minutes. A taxi drives to the station, but turns conspiciously and stops on the side of the building. I walked over and the driver looked a little perplexed at my appearance.
"Uh, you're not the taxi I booked, are you?" I asked, somewhat bereft of hope this might be so. He confirmed my doubts and we had a little chat - he was just off duty, and he was going to get his car washed, but if my taxi hadn't arrived by then he offered to drive me home free of charge, since he was heading that way anyway. Nice!
Five minutes later my taxi arrived and took me home. Ten euros for a five minute drive... But I got home eventually. A little wiser even, perhaps.
*