The Traveller.

Nine more sleeps … yawn … so what?

THE single digits have kicked in; the drum roll’s quickening. Louder.

Just now the pilot will be in its it seat, adjusting its cap for take-off.

Its peak points forward, the same way as its eyes. Sharp!

This baby’s not going to go down on you, oh no.

She’s not going to go splat into the body of Africa somewhere, and spill a cargo of charred corpses.

Oh no. You’re very calm. Air France? Never! Not on the way from Joburg to Athens…

A rising hoot and toot of cars reminds you that it’s morning, so early the birds have yet to peep.

The cock crows when you open the door to your tin office. You think: JUDAS.

Does morning betray night?

(ends)

Forget about 10 sleeps

YOU’RE thinking of a friend, on her 55th birthday today.

It’s the first thing you realise when you open your eyes: it’s May 1, a special day

Yes, yes, Workers Day too, but the real significance for you is the enduring friendship the date trumpets; you consider the qualities in that person that make an enduring relationship possible.

She definitely does not throw fuel on a fire.

You picture her and see a treasure; a rare gift more valuable than any jewel.

Priceless.

You remember her 45 years ago; a schoolgirl, considered and almost cautious, but always ready to laugh.

Her shoulders know how to shake, and boy, can she drum out a beat on a tin — anything really, that’s flat for a slap.and tickle twee do.

You sit at a separate table with her, banished to a corner during meal times, the two of you giggle too much. You barely can close your mouths long enough to eat, for fear of choking on a clod of  laughter and Miss Hills’ lumpy Scottish oats.

The separation from the other tables increases the intensity of this mutual and prolonged release.

But you beat the system, too, with this friend.

You collaborate to ensure that on visitors’ weekend you both have both days out: Saturday your parents, Sunday her parents.

Oh, those long car drives to get here or there. Handsome friendly dad, a beautiful elegant mother, you think you’re an extra in a chic magazine ad, sitting there all observant. Your tummy squeaks and squawks.

You hope the movie stars in the front seat can’t hear what you hear.

The next time you look, you’re not 10 years old anymore. You’re not 18.

You’re into the final third of your lives on earth. Together.

You get the feeling she understands, though she tells little and reveals less.

She is a beacon in  your life. A tenderness lived, and loved.

You say a heartfelt Happy Birthday, to a beloved and dear friend.

You say Thank You x

Lucky number

UM …. 11 more sleeps!

Until you lift off into the sky and wave Joburg’s twinkly lights goodbye.

They’ll blink, you know, as you turn to the window and peer into the dark; a lingering look at the pulsing metropolis.

One last cheerio as emotion rises, higher than the Brixton tower, and Jozi coughs under the night’s coal-smoke blanket.

Your face turns to the summer, where your heart already is.

Kewl.

Today, though, you’re thinking Legs Eleven (11), a term you heard as a kid, when there was dice or a card game of Bingo going on.

Now, you’re in the grasp of the paranormal, of numerology.

So you look it up, on the internet. 11.

Ah. A master number, doubly potent because it is a reflection of the other, but separate.

Intuition. Patience. Honesty. Sensitivity. Spirituality.

It is an idealistic number, says greatdreams.com.

The Twin Flames. Parallel. Transition.

Higher ideals, invention, refinement, congruence, whispers loveandlivedivine.wordpress.com.

Balance, fulfillment and vision.

There’s more. she sighs. The number’s vibrational frequency balances masculine and feminine traits.

The sages concur … sun and moon too, perfectly aligned, balanced.

Yes, 11 means you’re on the right track, with integrity.

You can hold your head high, yes, but don’t put your nose in the air and think you piss eau de cologne.

For the number 11 is not significant only in numerology. It lives in all sorts of things.

Such as the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific.

It includes the deepest part of the ocean, an 11km drop into the darkest of the dark, called the Challenger Deep.

The GPS coordinates are 11″ 21′ North latitude and 142″ 12′ East longitude  for this 2 542km x 69km trench that, apparently, submarines like to negotiate.

You can pack away your little snorkel and goggles though, and instead, ponder the beliefs and knowledge around the number 11.

The 11th hour. Elevenses for tea, and so on.

All you know is that your flight leaves on the 11th, on the cusp of a full moon, a symbol of a beginning.

Destiny’s got your number.

(ends)

Ka-boom

UM … 12 more sleeps. 

You wake up smiling. Changing your Athens to Mytiline, Mytiline to Athens flights was easy peasy, one, two, three.

It didn’t cost a bomb, either, a paltry E10.

Thank you, Aegean Airlines. 

(Bow, and blow a kiss to the smooth operator.)

So far so good.

Much better than so far no good, which can happen sometimes and draw a cloud across a wrinkled brow, a woolly scalloped cloud.

It darkens the horizon.

Today though, Tuesday, has no shadow to eclipse its imminent glory.

It shines. It promises a chance to exercise jaw-grinding patience; there are queues ahead, today.

Drum roll. 

You submit to the demands of bureaucracy … you have to. You remember the word meek.

And think of Sybil MacMahon, who worked on the make-up counter at the chemist in King William’s Town.

You rent a room in her house for the last quarter of your matric year, the final year of high school, 1977.

She teaches you to make chicken casserole, to pour (and swallow) drinks and to light cigarettes for damsels in distress: you strike the match and light your own cigarette so as to gallantly inhale all the sulphur, then and only then — once the head of the match has burnt off and the wood is burning madly — only then do you offer it if to your eyelash-batting beauty.

Meek.

You open the kitchen door for Sybil when you hear her car is in the driveway; you step out, take her coat (or a grocery packet or the cat food, whatever). She sighs all the way to sitting room and flops onto the sofa.

She eases off her shoes, all day behind the counter she stood,  you know.

Up goes the skirt,so she can peel off her stockings, then she loosens the hair that’s packed around her head.

It’s a style that’s bordering on beehive but not quite. Definitely unique.

She smiles at you there, leaning against the door jam.

Where’s that bluddy drink? 

Meek. You turn and pour whisky into a crystal tumbler. You hold up to the light.

It sparkles. Like today.

(end)

See me feel me

13 MORE sleeps.

And the soundtrack of your pending departure is no more adagio; it’s become rather allegreto, sort of like Killing me softly to Last night a DJ Stole my Life.

God forbid that it should get to the agitato stage … 

For now you’re on Love, Love me Do.

And practising your winking in the mirror as you place another pair of boots in the box you have for them: your boots in a row, sandals and things in plastic shoe-boxes; your breathless handbags stretch a Shoprite plastic bag knotted at the handles.

Oh crumbs. It doesn’t fit in. Two boxes then, of shoes and handbags… that will stay at home, in your tin office turned storeroom.

You’re not Imelda Marcos but you do like footwear and it’s painful relegating your blue suede vedldskoene to obscurity.

Your cowboy boots, your shiny black splurge boots … there they are, discarded too in the caverns of caprice.

Choices. The commitment that is choice. This pair of shoes. No, that pair.

This type of life … no, that type.

Choices, change. 

You try Walking on Sunshine When Bouzoukis Played!

(ends)

14 more sleeps.

Exciting. Daunting.

It’s like being a piece of elastic —- pulled to travel yet the other end is so firmly rooted.

You feel so fond of the things you’re going to leave … the dogs trigger a heartfelt affection; those friends you love to hate, and love again – they seem to be irreplaceable beacons of refuge and succour.

When will you laugh again, like that? Will you? Ever?

Your heart softens to coddle the memory of them, the pictures of separate lives entwined, Rewind to remember.

But it’s not that time now.

No. You’re going forward.

Sorting, shedding, shredding.

You aim to travel light, to live light, to breathe light.

Baggage is a bugger. You want none of it!

Out go the black bags, lots of them.

They’re full of nothing you want with you; they burst with emptiness; they fly away on the wings of no regrets.

And you watch. You see yourself, transparent. Diaphanous. Content. Focused.

You’re so comfy in your boots, they’re like no boots at all.

(ends)

Call centre blues

TURKISH Airlines gave me the first taste of how impossible it is to get through to an airline call centre.

I hung on, literally for hours, listening to voices telling me to be patient, my call is important.

Eventually, I took the Gautrain to ORT International, and went to the Turkish Airlines desk.

Right. Lots of forms and calculations to facilitate a refund, then I waited.

And waited. As if the pain of the rand shrinking was not enough.

About two weeks later, I battled the so-called call centre again, but alas, there was no reply.

Again.

I got a brain-wave and phoned the Airports Company South Africa at ORT.

They gave me the airline’s ORT telephone number at their office, but that too did not bring any results.

I called Acsa again.

This time they gave me the mobile number of the airlines’ Operations Manager.

Bingo! This is the way to go.

The Turikish Airlines OpMan in Joburg established that my refund cheque was idling in a staff member’s desk drawer.

Yes. Just chucked there and forgotten. She told me the cash would be in my account in 24 hours.

And it was.

I went back to Air France, for my flight from Johannesburg to Athens; it was the same airline I’d travelled on last year, to Greece.

My June flight was booked, then the date began to stretched too far into the future.

I had to change my R16000 ticket and surprise surprise found that a ticket for May was half that price.

But, when I tried to change the flight online, the fees and the R8000-something ticket price exceeded the total costs of the R16000 one!

Weird.

I tried the Air France call centre … This couldn’t be fair?

Yes, you guessed it. Hours and hours of hanging on: some times I timed 20-30 minutes before I hung up.

Then I got a lacklustre person called Rae on the Air France call centre line.

She told me hold on, and on, and then she said she could not help me and put down the phone!

I nearly cried.

What to do?

Well, you know, phone Acsa and ask for the Air France OpsMan.

Bingo!

Marice was a star, and again an efficient OpsMan worked magic. Nathaniel and Ranusha flapped their angel wings and nursed me through my smouldering panic.

My R16000 ticket was changed to an R8000-something ticket and I got a voucher for the balance after the cost of the ticket and the changes was deducted. That’s ok. 

Had I not spoken to a real live person, I would have had to spend more money for this new, lower cost ticket, than the original one,.

I think it’s important that these airlines, any airlines, make it easier for clients to get hold of them over the phone.

There are some things a computer cannot do … and now I have the dates of a flight on Aegean Airlines to adjust.

Hold thumbs!

(ends)

The invitation
IT arrived yesterday, the Invitation for Holidays In Greece to stay at “My House” in Eressos, Lesbos.
Cute, but what about the street number, the street’s name?
“We don’t have these things here,” she said. LoL.
LoL indeed.
I trust the visa people will understand.
They might, when I tell them the postal address is a single post office code (the same for everyone in the village), Lesbos, Greece.

Eressos is a village that started rising in about eight to six centuries before Christ, according to Wikipedia.
It had a population of 1130 people in 2001 (that may be the whole municipality, I don’t know. Point is, it’s not a metropolis).
Sheep and goats, and olive trees, they outnumber human beings. There is a whole lot of sky and fresh air.
I haven’t heard the sound of olive trees. Nor have I seen their leaves bob and sway.
I long to set my nose along their leaf-skin’s silhouette. Do they tremble in the breeze?
Olive trees.

From the web:
“Eressos makes a brief appearance in the novel Sure of You, the sixth volume in the series Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. In the chapter entitled “The Third Whale”, Skala Eressou is described as a seaside town with concrete buildings and a beach of coarse grey sand. Some places in the town are described. These include the shop on the square where Mona found the key rings inscribed with the name “Sappho”, the hotel called “Sappho the Eressian” where Mona stays in a spare, clean room with a single bed and a lone lamp, the big grey bluff at the end of the beach where more nude bathers were gathered, and the famous tents put up by the women who were part of Sappho’s tribe.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eresos

From the web SERIAAS :: Land usage in Lesbos

Click to access kizoskoulouri.pdf

• SOUTH Africans travelling from South Africa to the Schengen countries will find that gathering documents for the visa is not rocket science.
• However, it does require patience, and planning.
• Getting your Schengen visa sorted for a flight from South Africa is a precise process.
• The http://www.vfsglobal.com website outlines the protocol, as do other websites, ones that offer a visa service: they collect the documents, drop them off for processing and deliver the visa, once it is ready.
• If you haven’t previously applied for a Schengen visa, and done your biometric tests (they are valid for five years), you have to go in to the various VFS centres in the major cities to do it.
• It can be a schlepp, collecting the documents, and authenticating them. Just make sure everything is in order.
• I plan a two-day mission, and execute. There are no short cuts!
•
• This is what you need:
• Application form (download from http://www.vfsglobal.com and complete)
• Colour photographs
• Confirmed ticket
• Passport (valid: see requirements on website)
• Proof of accommodation abroad
• Three months original bank statements or any supporting documents from the bank
• Travel insurance min E30 000 (can be provided by credit card you used to purchase ticket)
• You get that altogether and ring a visa service, even if you need the biometrics done.