A Nightmare at the Airport

It's the end of what's been a very long day, and one that did not go at all according to plan, but we still made it to the hotel in Budapest, Hungary. Before I get to the story of today, I'll do a quick summary of what I've done since then. On Sunday, me, my father, grandmother, and uncle went to the villages where my grandmother grew up. Our first stop was Kozielsko, the village that my grandmother was forced to move to after Nazis invaded her home town of Niemczyn when she was only a young girl. There, we visited my great-grandmother's grave, who was murdered by Nazis at the time. Our next stop was a memorial in the woods to a group of people kidnapped and murdered by Nazis. One of them was my great-grandfather, and the other was one of my great-uncles. Lastly, we went to my mother's hometown of Niemczyn to visit the farm my mother was born in, and spend some time with her family.

On Monday, we went to downtown Bydgoszcz to try their new water trams. They were ridiculously cheap, but there was no information or guide to the surrounding. The 75 minute ride was interesting nonetheless, and I got to pass through some locks for the first time in my life. Later in the day, we checked out Bydgoszcz's Little Venice, an island currently being renovated for tourists, and the progress from last year was impressive. On Tuesday, we didn't do much, but did go out at night and spend our last night at a busy restaurant on a part of the Brda river forming the island.

Today, we woke up at 7AM, and did not get to a good start. Within minutes, we discovered that our regional flight from Bydgoszcz to Warsaw was cancelled. We called the airline, LOT, and all they could do was give us a reservation for a later flight to Budapest in Warsaw (after proving him wrong that there wasn't an alternate flight). Getting to Warsaw was our responsibility however. We were able to take a train from Bydgoszcz to Warsaw at 9AM but it wouldn't arrive in time for the 12:30PM flight, so we had to settle for the 5PM flight, which didn't seem so bad at the time.

After a relatively nice four-hour train ride in first class, we took a taxi to the airport in Warsaw, arriving at around 1:30PM. The first thing we did was check in our bags for the flight to Budapest, and then we immediately went to the complaints desk for LOT airlines. All they gave us was a sheet to give to them and hopefully get a mail reply in a few weeks about compensation. According to the EU, LOT is legally obliged to compensate for our inconvenience. Our perils unfortunately did not end here. We then went to a LOT airline office in the airport to get more details about compensation, and to show them a news article from that morning that talked about LOT's unreliability. They couldn't do anything but give us a restaurant voucher (after we asked for one). After our airline provided dinner (which wasn't too bad), we used the internet hotspot for the few hours we had at the airport.

At around 4:40PM, we started walking to the gate because the flight was scheduled to board at 4:50PM. Suspiciously, the gate was full of people, but the actual info booths were empty. We called the airline at around 5:00PM to ask about the flight and lack of information, and they only told us that the flight might be delayed. We waited another half hour, and no one showed up. the flight was supposed to depart, but there was no information at all, and the flight monitors still said on time, despite crowds waiting for the flight. We decided to go to another gate and ask them about ours. They said that they called someone, and a few minutes later, the pilot showed up, abslutely clueless as to what was going on. A lady finally arrived at the gate at around 6:00PM, already 30 minutes after scheduled departure time. The weather at this point just to started to get bad, with some thunder (at and before the scheduled departure time, it was sunny outside). The lady immediately gave the announcement that the flight was delayed to weather. At this point, my father and a number of other people started to ask for answers, as it obviously wasn't the reason if the bad weather began AFTER the flight was supposed to be departed.

The lady then decided to give us info updates every thirty minutes, so we went back to the wi-fi hotspot. At 7:40PM, we finally boarded the plane, about 3 hours later than scheduled, and we departed at around 8:10PM. After our arrival in Budapest an hour later, we got our luggage very quickly, and took a bus to the metro station. We then took the metro downtown, to where our hotel was. I was very pleasantly surprised with the hotel, and it was nice to relax after a long and tough day. Before settling down, we quickly scouted the area around the hotel and found a 24 hour convenience store.

It's been a long day, and I've learned two things: Things may not always go as planned, so you have to get used to it, don't fly LOT airlines.