Bergamo Orio airport has sleep capsules. Costs 9 euros an hour. Expensive, but rest is a valuable thing, especially if you're flying for a long time and you're sleep-deprived. I would have tried them, but I have no reason to, I arrived right on time for the flight. It did get delayed by an hour, though. I'm sitting, drinking a tasty latte, gentle, just how I like it. There are no free tables, for the first time in my life I sat down next to someone. At the same time, I bought a small sample of a trdelník, which is called a cannoncino.
I'm flying into rain and cold, but at least I'm heading home. The flight is an hour and a half late. The vacation was good, a lot of beauty, no conflicts, and the price was seemingly okay. The only thing is that the heat was getting to me.
The day somehow went wrong from the start. I woke up an hour earlier than I planned, at 6:30. The flight to Vilnius was delayed by an hour and a half. Turns out, I have to take the next train, not the early one.
Once I landed in Vilnius, I tried to buy a bus ticket to the center. You can only buy one from the driver with cash. Okay, I install the app. For some reason, there are two of them. One has a super-low rating, I decided to skip it. The second promises a free ticket for installing — beauty! I try to "buy" this exact free ticket — it demands a minimum top-up of five euros. While I was torturing the apps, two buses left, at this rate it won't take much to miss the next train too.
I said screw it, started looking for cash, found two euros. Got on the nearest bus, afraid of being late, bought a ticket for a euro from the driver.
Turned out, the bus isn't going to the center. Got off in the middle of nowhere, ordered a Bolt. An electric one arrived quickly, beauty. No complaints about Bolt, gave me a breezy ride.
But I do have complaints about the Lithuanian railway. First of all, they still don't let people with non-Lithuanian IP addresses buy tickets. They are clearly defending against DDoS attacks, but that doesn't make it any easier for me. In case anyone doesn't know, your IP address while roaming will be from your cellular provider, not the host country. Accordingly, I can't buy a ticket on the website with my LMT, and I have to look for a ticket office.
And I hadn't eaten anything since the morning, so first I went to get some grub. I didn't want a local kebab because of a past bad experience. Grabbed what I saw, pirozhki. It didn't work out right away here either: need cash again. Ran to an ATM, thought I'd have to pay a commission because I'd reached my limit. Turned out, I could still withdraw.
Okay, bought the pirozhki slightly suffering from gigantomania, went to the platform. But the train seems to not be there. Peered into the PDF schedule — and there's a little Christmas tree drawn there. Which apparently means this route only runs on holidays.
What can you do, sat down on a little bench, took out the food I bought, slowly gnawing on it. The filling didn't spark enthusiasm, so basically I fed the grub to the pigeons. They devoured it instantly, even though it was basically two huge pirozhki.
I trudged drearily to the supermarket for some better food. On the way, a guy intercepted me, looked completely normal. Wearing glasses, dressed in jeans and other regular clothes of a young man. Said he lost his wallet and needs a ticket to Klaipėda. I answered that I could buy the ticket, but I know there are a lot of scammers, and I'm ready to do this only if he gets on the bus right in front of my eyes (so he couldn't return the ticket and get the cash). That's my past experience with the Riga station talking.
The guy seems okay with it, checks the routes, and it turns out there are no seats on the nearest one. Okay, but the next route is already after my train, which means I won't be able to verify the reality of the situation. The fact that he agreed to my conditions, and told me details about his situation, calmed me down a bit. In the end, we went to a machine and I bought him a ticket with my card wirelessly. He asked for my number so I could send him my account, and he'd transfer the money to me later (these details will be important later). Also asked for water, since it's a four-hour ride. I gave him my mineral water.
As for me, I bought new food and liquids, and I'm dragging myself back to the station to get on the train. There's not that much time left, I'm trying to figure out if the steam engine leaves from the first platform. And then my Revolut bank sends me an SMS with an authentication code. I didn't ask for any SMS, and my paranoia level instantly spikes, especially considering the previous events.
I'm afraid that I'm somehow being cleverly scammed into hacking my e-bank, I reset the password and set it up again, do the selfie and other crap. Out of the corner of my eye I see the train still isn't there, and the departures board seems to be showing something wrong. I run to other tracks, but they seem empty too.
I don't go all the way to the end, because it's hard to imagine that the train will arrive at the very last track when there are a bunch of options before it. Alas, as it turned out, that exact 17:42 route starts all the way from track 9!
And that's how I missed the train. Suspicions immediately crept in that the previous one was also somewhere in a weird place, and I just stupidly didn't figure it out (even though there are boards everywhere).
I'm already stressed from the fact that I really urgently need to go to the trauma center for an X-ray, and I'm seemingly stuck here in Vilnius. Seems like there are no buses to Dpils from Vilnius.
Luckily, there was another train at 19:50, which I got on without any major issues. Before that, though, I managed to spill mineral water all over my duty-free purchases.
Avoid sleep deprivation and heavy ~~drugs~~ meds, kids, otherwise the same screw-ups will start popping out of you. On the other hand, I want to shout out what I overheard during the flight: RyanAir – we don't care.
How everything would have happened if the aeroplane had arrived on time, we'll never know, unless we learn to communicate with parallel worlds.
Personally, I don't think the guy was a scammer. He didn't look like an addict or an alcoholic, introduced himself as Roman, a massage therapist, told me that he blocked the card of the issuing bank Monese from the app when he lost his wallet, but can't unblock it yet.
In Revolut you can freeze a card temporarily, but who knows how it works in Monese. Especially since he doesn't have to be an IT expert and do everything perfectly.
So it goes. All in all, I lost half a day, but got off lightly — except maybe I spent 8 euros on a second ticket and 4 on not very tasty pirozhki. Later, by the way, I bought some coarse wholemeal bread in Iki — very interesting.
As for Lithuanian public transport — they have things to work on. Starting at least with making sure foreigners can immediately understand that you can't buy a ticket online. And ending with making sure there are enough outlets near the benches at the station for people. My power bank drowned in coffee when I took a spill in the Dolomites, and without my phone I'm completely lost.