EuroSciPy 2025 🇵🇱

This was the trip where everything went wrong – we all have them. Maybe I was overdue. When you travel a lot, you learn to roll with the punches because there's no point in getting worked up about things that are beyond your control. You have to adapt, change your plans, and make the best of it. So, you may be wondering, what exactly happened?

It started off with a sprained ankle and airport delays on my flight to Warsaw. However, these weren't your typical flight delays. No information was shared, and the flight time came and went without any updates to the boards in the airport. At one point, the flight just disappeared from the boards. A little before midnight, there was an announcement for passengers on my flight to collect our checked bags, but no mention of what had happened. There wasn't even a gate to go to to ask...

Concerned that I had missed something, I found the gate agent that had told me that we would be delayed at least an hour when I had tried to board at the designated time and asked. He said we wouldn't be flying out until noon the following day, but didn't provide a reason why. In the lounge, I had heard from a fellow passenger that the plane was having fueling issues; however, I never got an official explanation.

On my way to baggage claim, I called Marriott to change my reservation in Warsaw, which I had booked on points, to start the following day and started thinking about how I could modify my plans to still see most of what I had hoped to see. The baggage claim happened to be next to the check-in for the airline, LOT Polish Airlines, so I asked there about the new flight time, and this time was told it would be 7 PM: 23 hours after the scheduled time. Out of curiosity, I asked about a complimentary hotel room, but the gate agent said it would take a couple of hours for them to sort that out, so I opted to go back home.

Right up until the flight, there was still no record of the changes in TripIt, which tracks my flights for me, or on Google. The only thing I found was on FlightAware. I heard whispers of this being done so the airline could pay their staff for a full shift, but it all felt very shady. Thankfully, we did actually fly out the second day, although we were further delayed, rounding it up to 24 hours.¹

The mishaps didn't stop here though. During the flight, I managed to tear off a sizeable chunk of my right index finger, while trying to take out the tray table. A flight attendant was able to get me a bandage, but this continued to bleed for a full day, and I nearly did it a second time later in the flight. It wasn't until a week later that it closed up enough to go without a bandage.

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In Warsaw,² I checked out the Warsaw Uprising Museum upon arrival and took care of the royal route, old town, Royal Castle,³ and the POLIN Museum of History of Polish Jews the following day, with a short stop for handmade pierogies⁴ from a tiny stall around the corner from the castle. After a whirlwind day, I noticed I had a little bit of a chill and a slight cough, but I tried to shake it off.

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The main purpose of my trip was to present at the EuroSciPy conference, which was taking place in Kraków. I took an early morning train from Warsaw to Kraków and hooked up with a tour of the Wieliczka Salt Mine and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The salt mine was fascinating: the guide takes you deep below the surface to explore caves carved out of salt in the massive former salt mine, which feature various sculptures and the astounding St. Kinga's Chapel and its salt chandeliers 101 meters (~331 feet) underground. The Wieliczka Salt Mine is actually one of the twelve original UNESCO World Heritage sites. Auschwitz-Birkenau was definitely worth visiting too, but obviously much darker; the guide there was also very informative, and I came out of it with a much better idea of how it was used and what happened there.

My presentation was on the following day in the late afternoon, so I woke up early to check out the free exhibits (Monday only) of Wawel Castle and the Dragon's Den, which was right next to my hotel. There are a lot of different exhibits at Wawel Castle, so my plan was to see it bit by bit, given my proximity. However, I started feeling more and more sick while I was there, so I ordered some hot soup for lunch when I got back to the hotel to get ready for my workshop. I had three hours still, so I decided to lie down for a bit after the soup in the hopes that I would feel a little better; I debated contacting the conference organizers to cancel on account of being sick, but having never done that before, and knowing that I was a key part of the beginner program at this conference, I decided against it – after all, if I could present after food poisoning at PyCon CZ 2023, I could handle a little cold. With plenty of time to get to the venue, I headed out on foot since it was about a 20-minute walk, and since I had run out of cold medicine brought from home, I scouted out a pharmacy along the route to the conference to buy some more medication.

Unfortunately, this opened me up for additional mishaps. Pharmacies in Poland don't operate like they do back home: absolutely everything was behind the glass case, and there was only one person working there, with a long line of people in front of me. Each of these people would proceed to have a conversation with the pharmacist before selecting a product, and by the time I got my cold medicine, I was on pace to arrive at the venue with only a few minutes to spare. I opted to walk a little faster, which started making my lungs burn, and I arrived at the venue only to find it empty – had I messed up the location? This has always been a fear of mine, and I usually double and triple check before heading out, but the sickness had clearly clouded my judgment; there was even a brief moment when I was walking there that I felt like I was going to black out and kind of forgot where I was.

I found a security guard and asked about the conference. He didn't speak any English, only Polish and Italian, but he was able to communicate with me that an Italian woman had been there earlier in the day also asking about a conference, so clearly I wasn't the only one to make that mistake. Extremely confused, I walked around that floor of the building to confirm that it was indeed devoid of any conference signage and then pulled up the conference website again. I was at the place stated on the venue page, but I was convinced I had missed something, so I scrolled down further and saw something new: a map. Incredulous, I realized I had gone to the main building of this university (where the name directs you to on Google Maps), but the actual location was a building within the complex another 15 minutes away on foot. At this point, I knew that, for the first time ever, I would be late for a presentation; there was no way I could get an Uber fast enough to arrive on time, and my best bet was just to walk fast, and hope I could shave off as much time as possible.

I made it to the venue in 12 minutes (8 minutes late), lungs on fire. En route, I had sent an email to the program team, but I didn't get any response. Given the delay, I half expected the room to be nearly empty upon my arrival, but it was actually quite full – apparently, most of the people were in my room. Without even getting a badge, I set up in front and apologized for my tardiness, explaining the situation to the audience, asking them to bear with me, before jumping into a 90-minute version of my "Beyond the Basics: Data Visualization in Python" workshop. At this point, my voice was extremely hoarse, and I had to choke back some coughs during the presentation. My brain was foggy, and I struggled to get through it. Shockingly, despite all of this, people still seemed to get a lot out of it, and a couple came up to thank me and chat afterwards.⁵

Before getting sick, I had made a reservation for this evening at a Michelin Guide restaurant for my post-presentation celebration, and I wasn't able to cancel it, so I headed there after resting in my hotel room for a bit. The restaurant offered me a chance to sit outside, which looked nice, but I had chills, so I requested the indoor seating, which was quite empty. Thankfully, I hadn't yet lost my appetite, and I was still able to enjoy the food.

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The next few days are a blur. My cough got much worse, and I had a high temperature for multiple days. I spent most of my time in bed and went out for soup when I needed to vacate the room for cleaning. There was an international folk art festival in the main square with a soup stand, featuring a variety of Polish soups, which was a great find. Right next to this was St. Mary's Basilica, which since I was right there, I popped my head in, and it was stunning 😍

When my temperature finally dropped, I thought maybe I was in the clear, and I went back to the castle to see the Castle Cathedral⁶ and bit of the castle's interior (nowhere near as impressive as the Royal Castle in Warsaw) before I went on a short tour I had booked before traveling to Poland of the Jewish Quarter (Kazimierz) and Schindler's Factory.⁷ The plan was to head to the conference afterward, but I started feeling feverish again during the tour (it certainly didn't help that the temperature was significantly lower that day), so I stayed in bed for the remainder of the day. While in bed, I noticed I had received an email from one of my fellow numpydoc maintainers, who was hoping to meet up in person for the first time at the event. It was crushing to not be able to.

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With only one day left before traveling back home, I was coughing so much it was hard to breathe at points. I was wondering whether I would be able to travel. That day, I only left the room for breakfast, which wasn't even enough time for it to be cleaned because I couldn't stomach anything – my appetite was gone. It took me the entire day to pack up my suitcase because every time I moved a coughing attack would consume me. I ordered COVID and flu tests to my home, so I could figure out what I had as soon as I arrived (I had begun thinking it was the flu, but others were telling me it could be one of the new COVID variants). The medicine also ran out this day, but I could barely walk a few paces without uncontrollable coughing, so getting more was out of the question.

My journey home on the 23rd was arduous: no flight delays, but my lungs were on fire, and even short walks around the terminals at snail's pace brought on coughing attacks that made it hard to breathe. After what seemed like forever, I arrived home and took the test, which ended up completely negative, meaning I still had no clue what I had; I began to fear it was pneumonia, but I couldn't imagine going outside again, so I did a virtual doctor's visit to get some hopefully better-targeted medication. Unfortunately, this didn't end up helping much and after another few days of hacking, I went to urgent care, where I was told it was indeed pneumonia, which I'm still recovering from. Fingers crossed it clears up before my trip to India in a couple of weeks.

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1. The food and service on the flight were both very good, but the whole experience gave me a bad impression of the airline. I had no issues when I flew with them within Europe last year, so I just prayed that the flight home would be without incident. ↩
2. When I entered the Uber at the Warsaw airport to head to my hotel, "American woman. Stay away from me." was playing on the radio, which made me chuckle – was this an omen? ↩
3. The castle itself was completely destroyed during World War II by the Nazis, but it was rebuilt in the original image, including the interiors, by the citizens of Warsaw decades later. ↩
4. This was actually my first time trying them, and I was instantly a fan 😋 I also learned throughout this trip that several of the foods I enjoyed in Latvia are Polish or have Polish equivalents: Latvian gotina candies are krówki (both words even mean "little cow"), stuffed cabbage rolls are gołąbki, both have a type of sauerkraut soup, and they also both have potato pancakes and sour cream in many spots. ↩
5. One person happened to be an organizer, and she was able to get me my badge, which turned out to be crucial because, if she hadn't, I never would have been able to pick it up, and my collection of speaker badges would no longer be whole. ↩
6. They also had a large collection of items from Pope John Paul II, who actually studied in Kraków. ↩
7. Having a guide for this was essential, not just to skip the humongous line for Schindler's Factory, but also to understand the significance of what you are looking at. ↩