A day to remember – take two

The final assignment of my tertiary students days is approaching and although I’ve done hardly any work for it, the anxiety of having to think about it has put me off posting anything original lately. I’ve also been firing Czenglish emails off to the dozens of real estate agents in Prague in a bid to resolve the ongoing tenancy issues which the missus seems strangely inert to. I may have hit upon an audacious and cunning plan in that department, however, which would involve sending the missus off to Prague immediately to clean the place up and hock it off at top dollar to the first person to register the remotest interest. This kill-several-birds-with-one-stone kind of territory: the missus would escape the job she hates, I would be relieved of the resulting ear-bashing and left to my own dastardly devices for a while, I wouldn’t have to worry about finding tenants from 20,000km away, we’d get a quick cash injection into the mortgage account here, the brother-in-law would stop nagging us for a loan to buy his own house, and I wouldn’t have to face the prospect of dealing with all that shit myself next year. That in turn would give me the chance to prolong my Asia Minor adventures next year (and maybe make a detour up the Kharakom Highway) and perhaps draw out my travels around that nuclear-weapon-and-homosexual-free country of Iran (have just purchased Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana as more background reading). By the way, that was an interesting answer President Ahmadinejad gave to an Iranian-American journalist at a post-UN press conference yesterday when challenged about his statement that there are no gay people in Iran. The journalist asked him how this could be because he knew some. “Oh, really, you should give me their addresses so that we can send some people around to learn more about them”.

But the real reason for my post today is to finish off that story I began a while back about catching the midnight express from Turkey. Okay, it was more like the CSA flight via Bucharest at 5.55am, but it felt like an escape. Getting out of Mecidikoy, I had to wait for a minibus at 4am, which was so late I was keking myself that I’d blown my last American dolleros on a flight that I wouldn’t catch and have no job to go back to. It was a miserable deathly-ashen wet day as well, so one’s spirits were sandpapering the pavement, especially as I was still recovering from my gastroenteritis and was hence weighing in at around 60kg. I had about 35kg of luggage with me, so I must have cut a rather sorry and forlorn sight trying to drag all my shit across the concourse when I had hardly any energy to lift one foot after the other. I was a bit nervous handing over my residency permit along with my passport, but it managed to pass muster and I was perking up by the time I stepped out onto the tarmac.

The CSA flight was an old Antonov-54 and a bit shakey as the G-forces pushed us out of Istanbul and rattled every nut and bolt on the way. But as the plane thundered through the cloud cover, the woes of the past few weeks began to drop away. The sun was blasting through the porthole, nicely lighting the religious epiphany I was about to undergo. It was still only 6am, but my attention was drawn to a long-haired blonde nubile with flawless skin and legs up to her throat (skin complexion is the one that does it for me, folks). Better still, this breathless vision of pertness stretched out before me a silver platter bearing an elixir of life shining with condensation – a can of Budejovicky Budvar and nothing else – and inquired in a sexy husky voice with an accent that I can now detect at a thousand paces: “Would you like a refreshment, sir?” This was the defining moment of my life. If this was my flight to heaven, I was staying aboard.

A brief stopover on the weed-strewn tarmac at Bucharest airport did nothing to interrupt the reverie, and touch-down at Ruzyne delivered me to one of those magnificent hot Central European summer days. And there was Hlidek waiting to greet me a big slap on the back. “My dear Andy! You did not expect me, no? Let’s go for beer!”