In December 2014 I was traveling from Kharkiv to Grenoble to visit a close friend. Warsaw was one of the intermediate stops where I needed to stop and spend the night. That was because I’d decided to save a hundred bucks and fly on a low-cost airline, which happened to fly out of Warsaw. But I’ll tell you some other time about how low-cost airlines are the pits. I picked an apartment 10 minutes from the airport, because the flight was at six in the morning, so I needed to get to the airport early, and in general I wanted to get a decent night’s sleep.
The day before, I used an ATM and took out 100 zlotys in a single bill. When I boarded the bus, the driver flatly refused to accept a bill like that, because the ticket cost 6 zlotys and he had no change. I walked through the bus asking the passengers to break a hundred. Well, at five in the morning the bus is obviously not exactly packed, and in fact there are only about four people altogether. In the end, one kind girl broke the hundred for me with two fifties. But the driver refused to give change from a fifty, too. So I walked through the bus a second time. But this time I couldn’t get it broken. In the end, the same girl simply handed me 10 zlotys. As fate would have it, the driver didn’t have change for that bill either. Well, at that point I decided to leave him 4 zlotys as a tip, just so this story would end sooner.
I went back to the girl and we started talking. It turned out she was from Latvia and worked as a finance specialist at a bank in Warsaw. And something similar had happened to her too, when she was in some airport without the local currency and some unfamiliar man paid for her. And so now, she said, she was also doing a good deed for a stranger. I suggested we continue the conversation at the airport, where I could buy her a coffee and thank her, but she declined, saying that she had already checked in and was rushing to her plane.
In August 2015, when I came to Istanbul and also didn’t have any local money, an unfamiliar man paid my fare on the tram. Well, most likely he was an undercover detective who was simply on duty at the stop, since there had been several terrorist attacks in Istanbul the day before, but it was still nice.
A few days later, it was my turn to play the giver of kindness: I paid the fare for a tourist who couldn’t buy tokens from the token machine because it didn’t take plastic cards.
Help others when they’re in need, and don’t be shy about asking for help yourself. Kindness should circulate in nature.