As the pregnancy moved along I knew I’d have to overcome my fear of driving on the Polish roads. It was a dangerous endeavour but realistically I needed to learn how to do it for Andrew’s sake.
We had looked into buying a second hand car in Poland but you would have thought you were buying people’s first born for the ridiculous prices they set. I had seen enough and knew that it would actually be cheaper to buy a car in the UK and drive it over. This plan had one obstacle though and that was that all cars on Polish roads must be left hand drives.
We contacted a garage that dealt with cars from the VW family and asked about the cost of importing and converting a Skoda Octavia. I had grown up making jokes about Skoda’s but their reinvention was complete and the Octavia was the perfect family car. Luckily it turned out that the price of conversion was extremely cheap.
That in itself worried me.
The last hurdle was an administrative one and we had to get plates to register the car before we actually got the car. I know it’s completely ass backwards but if public officials didn’t make such stupid rules why would people bribe them?
I started scouring through the internet sites selling second hand Skoda Octavia’s. The name Skoda in Polish is very funny or at least ironic as it’s extremely close to accident. In times past that might have been where it originated from, the Poles did like to name things after brands; Adidasy meant trainers and Rover (spelt with a ‘w’ instead of a ‘v’ but that is their pronunciation) meant bike but after all Skoda was a Czech name not a Polish company.
Then just as I was organizing finance for it Elly turned up at the house in a brand spanking new one.
“Nice. Where did you get that then?” I asked thinking she had rented it, a bit wasteful but it would be useful until we got ours.
“Mama bought.” She said cheerily.
What?
Your Mum bought a new version of the car we wanted?
I know in Poland, especially the village, everything is a fucking competition but this was a bit much.
“For us.” She added.
“Your Mum can’t afford this. We can’t afford this.” I said.
“It’s ok. It’s on credit.”
Well not really ok.
It was a hell of a gift and honestly not one we needed. We did need a car but buying a new car wasn’t a sensible use of a limited budget. We still needed nearly everything for Andrew and the last list I made was four A4 pages long.
“Come on. You drive.” She said throwing the keys at me.
“I don’t want to.” I really didn’t.
It was one thing to jump into a car that I owned and had paid for but to climb into a car that Elly’s Mum had bought and couldn’t afford was too much pressure.
“Is it because the stick is on the other hand?” She asked as she stalked over to me.
“Not at all. I have things to do here. I can’t lose the light. Maybe tonight when am done we can go for a little drive.” And the roads would be quieter.
She agreed and parked the car in the garden. The rubbish in the garden was an issue to deal with and I still had no idea how we were going to fix it but the rest of the house was looking nice.
It wasn’t long before I took it out and as the darkness descended the roads cleared and I felt more comfortable behind the wheel. It felt strange at first and I did put my hand down into the door when I tried to change gear but I quickly got used to using my right instead of my left hand. Roundabouts where easy enough as was driving on the opposite side, I guess it helped sitting in the wrong seat. If I’d been on the right side of the road in a car with a steering wheel on the right it would have been stranger than having the wheel on the left.
The biggest difference was that the person on the right had the right of way. Not the person on the main road but the person on the right and it confused the fuck out of me. It was bad enough that I needed my headlights switched on during the day but the idea that I could be driving along and then someone popped up to the right of me and he had the right of way. Also during the many traffic jams I learnt that unless you were bumper to bumper some arsehole would stick their car into your lane. They would indicate after they’d moved.
Polite.
I knew why there were so many accidents with drunk drivers. It was because the normal drivers were complete shits. I got so paranoid and nervous because I couldn’t trust the fuckers that I got a nervous twitch and started to steer out of crashes that might never have happened.
The speed limit was lower than in England but you wouldn’t have guessed it the way the drivers raced between traffic jams. I had a little experience from being in the car with Monika but where as I liked to slowly approach a set of changing lights to drift through, Poles would race up, screech to a halt then tear away again.
Everything was 100 miles per hour or 160 kilometres per hour and then full on brakes. I understood why they changed their tyres for the winter and summers, they thought they were all F1 drivers and liked the pit stops. Elly seemed as nervous a passenger as I was a driver, that could be said for me when she was driving as well. She seemed to wait until she got into the car until she’d start calling people. Sometimes she’d call people just to say hello.
Poles loved to drive and talk. Blue tooth or hands free where alien concepts and if they weren’t talking they were eating or smoking. Nobody could just driver. It was like they required a distraction. The intricate ballet of constantly shifting lanes wasn’t enough, they needed more danger.
I protested constantly about all the things that drove me crazy when I was driving but Elly and other Poles just shrugged it off. It wasn’t that they justified those actions. They merely shrugged them off as if I was city boy trying to tame a horse to ride. It was the danger of the road. I think the Brits do the same with business, they shrug at people who don’t understand finance or contracts.
You can’t work PowerPoint?
Ha.
You learn that shit in the uterus.
For Poland they had that attitude to dangerous driving.
I had been invited to be a speaker at a conference in a place called Wrocław. It was in the south east of Poland close to the Czech boarder. It was a conference on accountancy standards and the guys I was teaching had recommended me. I was going to give a forty five minute speech, well, presentation on how to present your findings in English.
I was excited as it was the first such event I’d ever been invited to and I saw it as an opportunity to spread my wings. I wasn’t only going to be a teacher, now I was a speaker, a consultant. The only problem was that I’d have to drive there. I could have gotten the train, I should have gotten the train but I didn’t.
I planned out my journey and knew that once I got out of Warsaw I had to get onto Route 8 or a road called the E67. It sounded like and artificial ingredient listed on a pack of gummy bears. The estimated time of the drive was six hours for about three hundred and fifty kilometres. That was about 60 kmph or about 40 mph for the journey. I never found out though.
Before I even hit the artificial flavourings highway I got a call saying the whole thing was cancelled due to insufficient ticket sales.
I couldn’t believe that they had left it so late to tell me. I was sure that they knew the ticket sales had sucked for weeks but it was more the thought of being just a teacher again that depressed the fuck out of me.
I made my way back to Elly a sad but competent driver on the Polish roads.