Laziness, carelessness, 'small' mistakes, procrastination and being unpunctual are not bad always. Sometimes these are the qualities that put you in to lot of excitement, action and adventure. This is what happened to me and 2 other friends of mine when we made a weekend trip from Helsinki to Stockholm, the capital of Sweden (which is the center of world politics right now, thanks to Julian Assange and his Wikileaks!).
It was a dull-white, snowy but pleasant afternoon, the weekend before Christmas. Most of my colleagues there were already on long vacations or were about to dump their laptops and jump on a flight or cruise depending on their destination. But back home in India, my team was working hard as any other 'insignificant' day of their lives. Me, caught in the middle, was neither needed to work as hard as I would have done had I been at Chennai, nor was I able to pack-up and go on vacation as coolly as my European colleagues. So was the situation of my 2 other friends - Athi and Antony. But we managed to book a day's trip to Stockholm that weekend in a cruise from Helsinki.
While laziness and carelessness are my personal traits, collective procrastination and unpunctuality of some of us in the team adding to that caused a hurdle to our departure to the Swedish capital that evening. Our cruise was scheduled to leave the port ('satama' as it is called in Finnish) at 5 pm and we had to check-in at 4.30 pm. We hurried from office at 2.30 pm, and reached my house, did some last minute packing/stuffing some snacks/charging batteries and mobile phones etc etc. Meanwhile I got a couple of phone calls (wasting few precious minutes!! ;-)). It was 3.15 pm when we ran out of the house targeting a bus to Helsinki (we were in a place called "Espoo", about 40 minutes from Helsinki city) which would arrive in a couple of minutes.
It was at this point we made that 'small' mistake. Before our bus there came another one, numbered 216A if I'm not wrong, which was also heading to Helsinki. Why wait then! We just jumped in, only after confirming with the driver that it IS going to Helsinki. What the driver didn't tell us, and what we realized after few minutes, was that it was taking a different route. And that different route was in the opposite direction which we'd never tried till then! By the time we realized it was a new route we had come a long way, and were, as fate decided, back near our office premises! What a tragedy! Clock was ticking as usual, but the circumstances made it seem running faster. For a moment, I imagined, Einstein was laughing at me and teaching me relativity yet another time.
We were clueless how long it would take for the bus to reach Helsinki central, though the driver assured us we'd reach Helsinki 'soon' but never mentioned any time. He did not know English much and our Finnish vocabulary was lesser than the number of fingers on my either hand. Thankfully, after few anxious minutes the bus got back to right direction to Helsinki and we breathed a bit easier. Anto started clicking few photographs and the situation relaxed little bit. We kept assuring ourselves that we will reach well in time, since the roads were almost deserted all the time in Helsinki and also the way our bus took was not the main highway. It was 4.10 pm when our bus took a sudden turn towards the main highway and came to a halt few minutes later from where it should take no more than 5 minutes to reach Helsinki central. We looked forward through the front glass and we couldn't believe what we saw. There were hundreds of automobiles ahead. For the first time in 5 months we saw 'traffic jam' in Helsinki.
With only 10 more minutes for check-in to close, and since we had a 4-minute tram travel from Helsinki to the sea-port, we couldn't avoid sweating even in that minus-degree snowy weather. The usual, unavoidable, inescapable silence of Helsinki amplified our heart beats several times.
(To be contd..)
--S--
