Travel advice, or important information you need to have with you when travelling

When you’re travelling somewhere new, be it to a new city, a new country, or a new continent, it is usually a good idea to have some idea of where you’re staying – this could be as simple as the address for your accommodation written on a piece of paper.  It’s also a good idea to carry a cell phone with contact information for somebody who can tell you where you need to be.

What is not a good idea is to not do either of these things, lest you find yourself lost in a foreign city at midnight when you’re tired and cranky and all you want to do is sleep.

Believe it or not dear reader, this happened to me last night.  I found myself following very clear instructions for how to find my friend’s house, but couldn’t quite find the right apartment as I didn’t know the address.  So I decided to turn around and walk back to the bar so I could ask, only to find myself needing to pee.  Now Sweden has rather a lot of public toilets for use by the lonely and weary traveler, but these are pay toilets – usually 5 kroner ($1NZD) a pop.  But what do you do when you don’t have 5kr to access the public toilets?  I decided that I would employ the rather sneaky but safe technique of going into a bar and using their restrooms, without paying for a drink.  Unfortunately the only bar that was on the way to where I thought I was to go was not very well patronized, and so my entry was rather conspicuous.  I braved the knowing stares from the locals that very plainly understood what I was doing, but I didn’t care because when nature demands certain actions, there is little that will stand in her way.  Much relieved, I exited the bar to find that Karma would act swiftly to ensure that my abuse of the bar’s unintentional hospitality would not go unpunished.  I exited the bar and promptly turned in the wrong direction to find myself very lost indeed.  This prompted me to do the only normal thing I could think of – pick a direction and run.

You could imagine the sight I must have been.  I was tired, grumpy, and lost, and here I am running through a town I knew nothing about in the middle of the night, frustrated and angry at myself for allowing myself to get into this position.  All sorts of images ran through my mind – I found wondering what I should do next – should I hail down a police car and explain my stupidity (‘that’s what you get for not using a public toilet’ they would say).  Should I call the nearest NZ Embassy and beg some kind of consular support (‘you mean you walked right into a bar and didn’t even buy a drink’)?

And then it hit me – maybe I could find a phone book somewhere?  Surely that would solve all of my problems?  Realizing that I’d seen a hotel a few minutes down the road during my last dash, I raced back with all of the renewed vigor that a second chance at sleep would bring and arrived at the reception desk and asked for a phone book to find that my friends were indeed listed, and so I requested that the kindly receptionist transcribe the address down for me and call me a taxi.  Which she did.

I waited outside for the taxi knowing that in a matter of minutes I would be in bed asleep, resting my jetlagged soul.  The taxi arrived to the sound of an angels’ chorus, and I showed him the address and off we went, much to the amusement of the taxi driver. 

I soon found out that I was actually on the street I needed to be on, and that the taxi ride home was 2.36 minutes (they time them over there).  This didn’t stop him from charging me a fortune.  I was too tired to argue however, and this was a fair price to pay for my own stupidity and so I handed him my future children’s’ inheritance and returned home to sleep.

Moral: always know where you’re going, and never take a taxi in Sweden.