His leather jacket was hanging off one shoulder and sweat pouring down his face as he approached the woman standing expectantly behind the counter.
"I have miss my plane!" He cried out.
The lady, clad in a retro-looking blue flight attendant uniform, appeared a little startled, "Why have you missed your plane?" she asked.
Blank stare.
"What language do you speak?" She tried again, to which he replied "I am from Serbia. But now you must book me new plane!"
"I can't book you a new plane." She answered, "I'm just the information desk." and after making a helpful gesture towards the ticket desks with her hand, he charged off, a handkerchief materialising in his hand to sweep across his forhead as he did so.
Frankfurt International airport was a bustling disaster on a Wednesday evening. If it wasn't a group of Germans yelling over a beer as Manchester United (almost) scored on the tv, it was a woman yelling in some far-flung dialect to one of her children who had wandered two feet away, one of which had somehow become entangled in a jungle of baggage carts, or a crazed Serbian man in a leather jacket who had missed his flight.
I had ended up here as a stopover on my way to Singapore, then finally Melbourne, and was to stay here seven hours before the connecting flight. Not that it mattered too much, I had one of the world's biggest airports to explore, with books from there to Wazoo and German cuisine to ingest. It would be one of the more pleasant stopovers of my life, I hoped.
It was lucky to be there at all to tell the truth. Upon waking up on Wednesday morning, I stood drowsily, wandered to the kitchen for a glass of water, wondered if going to the cafe early to get some work done for a client would be a good idea, but had a long shower instead. I had one last day in Stockholm before my flight home, and I had planned on getting a lot done. I had to cancel my bankcard, do some washing, send some postcards, buy some gifts for the people that had been, well, amazing during my stay. But as chance would have it I decided on a whim to check my flight itinerary, and lo and behold, by plane departed not the next day, but in four hours.
Needless to say, what occurred in the next hour was something the world has never seen before, the most incredible feat of stuffing things into bags and packing up a room ever.
Casualties included my bed, lamp, two scarves, and a Tommy Hilfiger jacket which I bought in Vancouver in 2007, and left in Stockholm in 2008. It lives in Sweden now, and I hope it finds a good home there.
Either way, in a somewhat divine series of events which followed, I managed to get out of the apartment, down to the street, and find a cab to Central Station, and there waiting for me were my two closest Scandi-buddies (a term I hope to coin soon…).
It could have been teary, but it ended up being a somewhat cheery farewell as the doors closed and the platform began to move away from the train carrying them with it.
It's been an interesting and rather intense three months. I arrived in weather that reached the negative twenties and hoped to brave the cold until the sun came about and summer rolled in. I had planned some pretty wild antics to consume my time in the chilly north, but as it turns out, I was soon hit with the realisation that my time living away from home, family and friends was over. It felt almost instinctual, like a little internal alarm clock going off, and I realised one morning with sharp suddenness that to stay and battle homesickness, and to travel and experience all these new things by myself wasn't actually what I wanted to do anymore.
That was a couple of weeks back, and now I'm on the way home again, sitting 31,000 feet in the air, surrounded by 'g'day's and 'crikey's, and and already wondering how I'll do back in Aus. It's been over four years since I've lived in Hollingsworth Ave. Admittedly, and not surprisingly, some friends gave up on me a while back - the facebook messages stopped rolling in about a year ago - I guess they thought I'd forgotten my promise of returning. Of course, I never thought I'd live abroad forever.
In any case, I've had a great time. Being away from home has taught me an awful lot, and living in these places which at first seem so similar to home, but become more and more different to it as time goes by, has been amazing and has opened my mind up to some fantastic things that I won't forget anytime soon.
So for now it's farewell Scandinavia. It's been fun, but I'll be back again!
Jimzip :D
