On arrival at the tiny airport in Balice, Poland, I was greeted immediately by a pleasant but rather bold taxi driver who began carting off my luggage, smiling widely and muttering something about 25 zloty. My suitcases were locked in his trunk before I could protest, and his price sounded dirt cheap. So I hopped in, and he took off, riding the center white line through winding, dark, empty back streets, all the while talking in a rapid, hard-to-follow Polish/German/English clip. Every so often he’d turn around and gesture to emphasize a point, and I’d envision us running off the road into a ditch. But, fifteen minutes later, I was still in one piece when he parked the taxi in the middle of the street, about a block from the Hotel Saski.

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