Ikarus

Some of my fondest memories of Warsaw as a kid, was riding on the public transport system with my grandmother. She taught me how to appreciate the different people that were on the bus (in those days practically everyone since few people had cars), they were they looked, or their conversation. You could really encounter anyone, from all strata of society often making the experience very educational - sort of like traveling to different countries. My favorite is still this guy I once say with a comb over. The trick was that instead of combing over the hair left to right, or right to left, he had it wound in a spiral. And not just a little bit, he must have had at least foot and a half of hair up there. Picture a hair turban. Anyway, I've been trying to get a picture of a one of the buses that used to run back in the day, but most of the buses on the streets are new, and many of the old ones, make Ikarus, have been modernized. I finally got lucky the other day and got a picture of one of the old ones, still with a manual gearbox. I remember being fascinated by this gearbox as a kid. The layout of the gears is completely different, second gear for example is up, and third seems to be, to the right. Apparently, I wasn't the only one that tried to break this gearbox code. Szymon, my flat mate, also spent many a ride as a kid hopelessly trying to discern the method of this shifting madness.