Thumbs up for good deeds!

So this evening I was walking out from Poczta Glowna after paying some bills and sending off a few things in the post along with flatmate Karoline. I slightly bumped into an hunchbacked old man with a cane who looked a bit lost and as I was about to pass him by and intended to hold the door open for him to exit as well he grabbed my arm (in a rather non-freaky way, surprisingly...) and started mumbling. We walked him down the stairs  and he kept pointing with his cane in the general direction he wanted to go. Looking cluelessly at each other Karoline and I walked him across the street and we soon noticed that he must have been nearly blind as he barely noticed where he was stepping. I put on my polish conversation mask and managed to say 'jestem z norwegii' to which he answered "aaah, bardzo zimny!"- which means "very cold!" and hopefully he understood why we kept spending more time looking for things to say than actually understanding him. So he kept pointing forwards and the conversation kept going like:

me: czy pan chce isc do apteka? (fantastic grammar by the way....)
old man: nie nie nie nie, dalej dalej do delikatesowe!

And I was like- right... he's pointing ahead and we almost walked onto the pharmacy wall but he doesn't want to enter and wants me to take him to the deli down the street which I have never seen in my life! And so we kept going.

At some point he started turning towards the buildings on the street instead og walking "prosto" i.e. straight ahead and kept saying "delikatesowe... jest tutaj!" and I was like... uuuh... no this is not the deli, it's a closed down 'zapiekanka' (Polish pizza-sandwich) takeaway booth! We kept going "prosto" and I read out the names of all the shops we passed but he kept saying "nieee, delikatesoweee!" so we asked a middle aged man on the street to ask the old man where he wanted to go and the middle aged man was a complete nutter and screamed out lout and pointed to a place with bright lights saying "DELIKATESOWE JEST TUTAAAAAAJ, JEST TUTAAAAAJ! TUTAAAAAAJ!" which was a bit freaky cause he said that the deli was in the direction he was pointing but with the loudest voice that made it sound as if we were all three a group of retards who did not know where it was. After telling him thank you thank you THANK YOU and goodbye we managed to guide the old man into the shop in the end and got a genuine "dziekuje bardzo, do widzenia!" back- at least he was very thankful for us helping him out :)

Considering that I have a polish test tomorrow, this little episode was the best revision session I could have had; not to mention it probably boosted my karma from moderate to ***infinity***



.n