Everyone was down at breakfast, I was lazing in bed. Finally the sun was shining through the window and I was about to get up when Daniel knocked on the door, came in and said get up we're going to the hospital...
Zelda had been showing them her version of narcolepsy by blacking out at the breakfast table... Laurie and Zelda were in the ambulance en route to the hospital and the hotel had a cab waiting to take me and Daniel there.
We got dropped off at the wrong hospital where we spoke to a lovely (sarcasm font) triage nurse who couldn't speak English. Somehow after working out the German word for ambulance, we found our way to the emergency department where they also couldn't speak English and couldn't find Zelda's name in the system.
We had no credit and we weren't really sure where we were so we set out to find a shop to buy credit or a pay phone. The pay phone swallowed our money and wouldn't dial the number. We bought a German sim card that we couldn't activate. We tried to catch a cab back to the hotel but the cab drivers kept saying they couldn't speak English and pretended they didn't know the hotel because it was only a short fare. They wanted an address and we didn't have one. We found a nearby hotel and payed for internet, wrote down our hotel address, tried to top up on credit online but can only do that if you have a European credit card..
We went back to the cab rank, forced them to take us to our hotel, asked our hotel which hospital we were supposed to go to and got them to speak to the next cab driver.
By this stage Daniel looked like he might punch the next person who couldn't speak English and I was getting worried that I would soon be worried about getting to the right police station...
This taxi driver seemed to drop us off at the right place but again, triage did not speak English, didn't find Zelda's name and directed us across the road.
After trying a few buildings and entrances in the area we finally found the right place. It only took us 3 hours... One and a half hours later Laurie and Zelda came out. Zelda a bit red, puffy and dazed. She'd had an allergic reaction to something and had some drugs pumped into her arm to sort her out. We still don't know what it was out of the cold and flu meds or the birdseed breakfast that caused the reaction... but she's going to stay away from both at least until we're in a country that speaks some friggin English :P
Don't worry guys, Zelda is fine now. We had lunch in their room and just chilled out for the rest of the afternoon then went for a walk and had dinner. She's all back to normal so no panicked expensive international calls ok?
Laurie was quite happy to have proof that "that birdseed sh!t is no good for you.." Lol!
Tomorrow we fly to Krakow.
2 comments:
Ack that sounded like quite a drama! Glad to hear Zelda is ok.
We had a similar issue with no English (but a lot less urgent) when we left a teddy bear on an overnight train. Damn phrase books don't have the English for "Teddy Bear"! Who would have thought ...
Would have been okay if i wasn't stressing so much.. What annoys me is that after we got the address and went BACK to the same taxi, and he took us to the hotel we wanted to be at he knew enough english to tell me how much money i owed him and how much change i would get and to tell me to have a nice day.. for serious.
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