Tense Travel Day

Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2014--Dresden to Wroclaw

We have gotten some very nice apartments by renting through Wimdu and Airbnb on this trip, but there are negative aspects to using such services.  One is that it can be very difficult to contact them and get action when a problem occurs.  I wrote earlier about the difficulty of solving a problem with an Airbnb rental in Brno.  Today was an example of another type of problem--arrangements for meeting to transfer the keys.

I made the reservation about two weeks ago for the Apartment in the Center of Wroclaw through Wimdu.  I had pleasant communications with the host.  I told him what train we would be taking, and he said others have taken the same train.  I contacted him about 5 days ago to say we had bought our train tickets, would arrive at the station at 14:27, and would walk from there to the apartment.  I commented that we didn't know if the train would be on time or late, and I estimated our arrival to be sometime between 15:15 and 16:00.  He wrote back saying he would be going out of town and he would arrange for a friend to meet us at 15:15 and sent her phone number for us to call if the train was late.  I wrote back saying that we do not have a phone that works in Europe.  He responded that it was very inconvenient that we didn't have a phone that works in Europe (as if all travellers were expected to have one) and that his friend would be here at 15:15.  He said that he had no idea whether the train would be on time or not and suggested that we should take a taxi to assure we would be here when his friend expected us.  In other words, he was making our arrival very inconvenient for us with absolutely little leeway if the train ran late.  I never heard back from him.

Last night, we researched and found that there is a tram that comes straight from the train station to here in about 12 minutes.  Furthermore, it is possible to buy tickets from a machine on the tram using a credit card (meaning we didn't have to waste time trying to exchange money and buy a ticket before getting on it).  That made me feel a bit better.  There was a tram at 14:59 that would get us near the apartment at 15:13!

Well, as expected, something went wrong with the train today.  For some reason, they ended up changing the engine.  That put us behind schedule.  Then, when we finally got to the edge of the station, we had to stop for about 4 minutes waiting for another train to leave.  When we stepped onto the platform, it was already 14:52.  We RUSHED out of the train station.  We found the wrong tram stop and were sent to another.  We rushed toward it.  As we waited for a street light, we could see our 14:59 tram turning toward the station.  We waited.  Finally, the light changed, we ran to the tram which was parked behind a bus, and jumped on.

It wasn't obvious how to use the ticket machine, but a man on the bus helped us--two single tickets for us and two luggage tickets for our bags which had to be processed separately.  I used the GPS on my phone to follow our program on an offline map I had downloaded earlier.  We got off our stop two blocks from the apartment at 15:13 and rushed again.  We arrived at the front door of the building at 15:16.  Whew!!  Fortunately, the lady was waiting for us and everything went smoothly after that.  But what if our train had been another 15 minutes late or later?  That's another kind of concern one must have when renting an apartment through one of these online agencies.

The apartment itself is very nice and large.  See the link on the name in the second paragraph for photos.  We had a bit of trouble getting onto the wi-fi, but it worked fine after I found their router/modem, unplugged the power for about a minute, and plugged it back in.

The train trip and getting to the apartment had eaten up much of the day.  Around 16:00, we went out for 3 hours just to walk and explore without taking photos or concentrating on trying to find specific sights.  My first impression of Wroclaw (pronounced vrots-wahf) is good.  Not nearly as many of its buildings have been restored as in the cities we have visited before now, but there is a charm about the city even if many of the buildings are still dark and grimy from years of neglect during communism.  Tomorrow, we will get out and explore with some goals in mind.