On the road...

[khiemtran]

One final post about Bulgaria, as I throw in a gratuitous snap of the A380 I rode home in at Changi Airport...



So, it was my last day in Sofia, and I was in the taxi to the airport...


I'd got in, said Dobar den to the driver, and he'd asked me in English which terminal I'd wanted. I was just wrestling with the seatbelt (coming to the realisation that not only did my seatbelt not work, but the driver wasn't even wearing his either), when the driver looked up from his mobile phone, gestured at the apparently empty road in front of us and said "Excuse me? Big traffic! Okay, we go this way?"

So, my heart sinks. I had no problems on the trip in from the airport the first time, but I had also heard of other people getting ripped off that same day. The trick is I actually have no idea if he's telling the truth or not. If the idea of "big traffic" on the way to the airport on a Saturday is completely absurd or just routine. As a traveller, I'm vulnerable to this sort of thing quite often, typically arriving in a new city jetlagged and with only minimal background knowledge, and the best I can is do my best to look like I know what I'm doing and watch out for the more obvious scams. Strangely though, while I worry about it all the time, no one has actually tried to scam me in over a decade (apart from the obvious touts at the airport, but surely everyone knows not to listen to them). But in this case, barring an immediate confrontation on shaky evidence, the driver has me cold, and I hear myself saying "okay".

So, we turn off and begin a high-speed navigation of a number of backstreets of Sophia, all the while with me pondering the wisdom of agreeing and bracing myself for an argument at the end of the journey. So much for all my so-called travel smarts.

On and on, we went, with me gradually feeling more and more skeptical that we were going the right way. But suddenly, there was a sign saying "Airport" and sure enough, the driver turned toward it. Next thing, we were back on the highway and speeding along towards the airport. Okay, so that didn't seem so bad then.

We pull up to the airport and I get ready for the possible confrontation. Blagodaria ("Thanks!") I tell him. Kolko struva? ("How much?")

Thirteen Leva, he tells me. Two Leva cheaper than the normal fare. Oh. So, that's alright then. I ask for a receipt and he not only gives me one, but also, it turns out later, the receipt for the previous passenger too.

So, suspicion unfounded. And as I head into the airport, I marvel again at how the world often seems to turn out to be not quite as bad as I fear.



And finally, a gratuitous picture of QF2 at Changi Airport, seen from the tail cam, as the aerobridges roll out to unload the passengers...

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

So happy it wasn't as you feared :-)

. . . And sometimes, even if cheating happens, it's unintentional. I walked to a nearish cafe over the weekend to bring some cakey snacks home. They were rather pricey: $2.50 for a piece of coffee cake. Oh well, I thought; it's a treat, so. So I got three. "Nine forty-nine," the teenaged cashier said, and without thinking I paid it. But as I walked home, I thought about it. Three times $2.50 is only 7.50. Even assuming a 7% sales tax (I forget how much the sales tax is for take-out food like that), that's still only 8.03. I finally decided that she must have assumed the cakes were $3.00 (or they really were $3.00, and I misread), and the sales tax is something slightly less than 7%. This was leaving me grumpy; I didn't want to have paid $9.49 when I'd only been thinking to pay $8.00-something, and how even that was much more than I had set out hoping to pay (I had wanted to get something for around $5.00).

But finally I thought, well, consider it a donation to a local business. It's only a dollar. And maybe I was wrong, and the pieces of coffee cake were actually $3.00 a piece. I mulled on it some more the rest of the way home, thinking about how so much of your feeling for something depends on your expectations.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, there's another story there. There's a restaurant not too far from us that tried one of those promotions on a popular coupon website. Each coupon offered a "seafood dinner for two" and a "bottle of wine up to $20" for $CHEAP. Which sounds from the outside like a good way to build your customer base. Unfortunately, if you look up the restaurant on the review sites, lots of the latest reviews are all negative comments about the small size of the "seafood dinner for two" (apparently they made an extra small one for the coupon customers) and the fact that they sometimes didn't have any wine under $20 a bottle.