Shit! The bag will never close!
Well, the idea just grew spontaneously as I was invited to take part in an annual meeting of an organization I am part of. I said to myself “Oh, if the meeting is taking place in Bulgaria, there are some fucking good countries around that I dream to visit since years and I’m not going to miss this chance!”
The 4th of June - 6:40 am, here I am down the house waiting for my brother’s friend, who was the only person that accepted to wake up so early in summer to drive somebody to Annaba’s airport; a facility that is neither looking as an airport, nor having the proper public transportation connecting it to anything else, and much less at such an early hour.
7:30 and I am still on ground waiting for that 70s Renault bus supposed to be taking us to the plane, but as goes the tradition, my considered-very-early flight from Annaba to Algiers that was supposed to link me to my second flight to Italy, on this day-long journey to Sofia, was with Air-Algérie, and also as goes the tradition, with our beloved competition-free national air company, I needed only 10mn more of delay from their part to miss my Milan flight and never write this article. Miraculously, we boarded.
Reaching Algiers two hours later than planned, rushing toward the international terminal, Insisting to take my big backpack within the cabin and passing the border police while near missing a heart attack that could have been provoked by a national mandate calling me to join the non-accomplished duty of the national military service. I had only a few moments in the room before boarding, and that time was too short to barely read one page of Erik Spieakermann’s Stop Steeling Sheep, being the only book I took for this adventure without any valid reason.
Inside the plane, I lost the counting over how many times I’ve been mistaken for a foreigner, so I was laughing out loud and repeating the word “water!” to the steward that approached me in Italian. An hour later, there was still nothing special about the landscape, though without surprise as we’ve been flying over Mediterranean waters, waiting for the far Alps mountain chains to break the monotonous image inside my window.
From the coast till Milan, It seems that I was looking at a labyrinth of endless farms and parks. After landing and zigzagging my way to the transfer terminal, I was not totally surprised by the two guards and the scanner, securing the entrance to the transfer terminal, something understandable in such a big migration hub as Italy.
An hour later, my first contact with Cyrillic letters in a real print document was with the newspaper that the hostess offered to me, again mistaking me for a Bulgarian, as this flight toward Sofia was more entertaining both by the landscape over mainland Europe and by the Swiss couple next to me, who were discussing all their family’s problems and making fun of all Bulgarian facts they could recall without a single suspicion that I could understand a word in French.
Sofia. Here we go!
