Chapter 17 – Dreaming while running
It is time
What do you do on the day that you have a travel that is coming up? You get anxious. That is what you do. That is what I did as I spent that Friday night packing. The ‘few’ items that had comfortably fit into my one suitcase exactly 90-days ago had ‘miraculously’ refused to fit. I had to get ‘help’ from a second carry-on trunk that was just small enough to hold five or so clothes. I still had more. I packed this in the laptop bag… and I was done!
“Phew!,” I exclaimed. Happy that it had all worked out.
Finally, it was the last day in Norway. The last day in Stavanger. The last day at UiS. It was Saturday, November 9, 2019. I did the last waking up at Paviljong 10, Room 217. I had already packed the previous night. I generally ready for this last day.
“But wait a minute!,” I jolted myself back to reality when I realized that I still had to pack my running shoes, the laptop computer and the beddings!
“The hech!,” I despaired, “This cannot be happening!”
Something had to give – the voluminous beddings had to remain. Bad things happen. The laptop had to be forced into the side pocket of the bag, while the running shoes just had to get into the trunk that was already too full to even open up to accommodate anything more.
I had promised to take some pictures of one of my colleagues who had missed the Sverd visit of the previous day. And… no photography at UiS can be complete if you do not take some photos next to the plaque under the tree, just opposite the bookshop. That plaque, that stands about one metre above the ground on a metallic post hits home in all ways, as it reads….
Vinner av
Nobel fredspris 2004
Wangari Maathai
plantet detter elketreet
den 11 september 2006
Stutelsen Point of Peace
(*You do not need a translation for that, do you?)
After the photography, it was already twelve, yet we were scheduled for a ‘last lunch‘ with our MSc colleagues at twelve-thirty. Immediately thereafter, we had the pickup by our host, Ralph, at two-thirty. Time was just flying. That final lunch would come and go, as we handed over all that remained from our rooms to our six remaining colleagues. They had a share of all manner of stuff that we had laid out on the kitchen dining table for their picking at their own volition. Call it maize flour, cooking fat, salt, spices, rice, beans, chicken, milk, juice, veggies, beverages, onions, tomatoes… you name it. We even gave out our ATM cards for Spare bank – with PIN! We surely did not have a chance to use them anywhere else. And there was quite some Kroner in these plastics.
It did not take long before Ralph was hooting us out of P-10. I do not even remember taking that farewell photo outside P-10 before my two colleagues got into Ralph’s car will I got into another that had been arranged by one of our MSc colleagues, who had persuaded a classmate to take the drive to the airport. I later learnt that the classmate with a car was from Eritrea. Anxiety of leaving Norway was so overwhelming that I do not even recall hearing that assertion that the Eritreans gals were the most beautiful. I do not remember that one because it is not true. I would have remembered if it were true. It did not take us more than 30-minutes to get to Sola.
The two MSc colleagues accompanied us into the terminal building, while Ralph who had already left for another errand missed out on this final farewell. It was just around 1530hours that we went straight to the KLM check-in counter and started the process of getting our boarding passes, as we let go our check-in luggage.
“Place it here,” the lady at the counter motioned to Oby
“Too heavy! You have 32, we only allow 23!”
It was time for Oby to start the sweating process.
“So what do I do?”
“You must remove items until you have 23.”
While he left to the side to deal, I matched onto the check-in counter for a similar routine.
“Let me see,” she started, “Just 23!,” she paused to maybe reconfirm that the scale was working. She would have been glad if I was being sent away to readjust, just as she had done to Oby already.
“Here goes,” she handed me the pass.
Mutua got his roadblock with a 27kg package, which now had to be reduced to 23kg. We had 4 plus 9 kei-jiz to find new places for! That is when the idea of stuffing the hand luggage came in handy. We stuffed them unproportionately full and even had to use some three additional polythene bags to carry additional material. We headed to the upper-level security area, each with a bag and a polythene bag. We looked heavy laden. We were heavy laded. And let me forget to mention that we had three jackets each. Putting on these layers of clothing was just a pretext for lack of space to carry anything items. Our bags were so packed that you could not open a zip – and if you managed, then you could not close it. How we ended up with so much stuff remains to be explained since I cannot explain.
Our 1720 plane indicated a new scheduled time of 1750. This script was just repeating itself. We had left JKIA late some ninety-days ago and failed to get our connecting flight to Stavanger because we were late. Now we were bound to leave Stavanger late, and we were not sure of getting our connection at Amsterdam. And just as we thought that we had seen it all, we saw a new departure time of 1800 hours!
We surely left at 1800hours and touched down at Schiphol at 1920, before another 15-minute taxiing within Schiphol. We literally ran out of the plane towards immigration. We joined a long queued. The Schengen gates were free and on self-service – just scan your passport, self-photo, and the gate opens. In our case we were in the non-Schengen queue. And… The queue was long!
“We shall not make it!,” I murmured.
We kept walking along, by faith, as we moved towards passport control. Finally, it was our chance to get the exit stamp. It was now just past eight. We now had to rush from the current location to the ‘E’-series gates, which were like a kilometer away!! We hurried in that direction, making it around 2010. We were soon called to board, ready for the 2040 departure. I took the first breath of relief when I finally settled on seat 26D of the 787-8 Dreamliner. I was seated on the isle side of the 3-3-3 sitting configuration per row. That machine was equally gigantic!
Dreaming in the liner
It was not until 2100 that we took off from Schiphol for the 7hr 45minutes flight from the Arctic circle back to the equator. Starting off mildly at a displayed speed of 1,200km/h at 11,888m (39,000), we hit the gas to 1,813km/h at 12,496m (41,000ft). That bird was so big that it hardly made any noise or discernible movement while on its flight path. The outside temperatures remained -52 degrees Centigrade most of the journey.
We were being welcomed to dinner hardly an hour into the flights. I called it a snack – some little rice and some little chicken and some little juice. Once the utensils were cleared and out of the way, it was time to hit the movie theater on our individual screens affixed behind the front seat. One plug of our headphones into the earphone jack on the armrest and a flip through the channels on the remote affixed below the screen, is all we needed to get anything that we needed. I watched a full movie and started on the second which soon become too heavy in the eye. I soon hit pause button, leaving the moving frozen mid-frame, and hit slumber land just like the rest of maybe 80% of the passengers.
“Let me free!,” I struggled to say while trying to wiggling free.
“Mmmhhh! Let me go!,” I tried again. Words refused to come out.
I struggled some more. Something is still holding me back. I cannot be free!
Then I started getting consciousness. I struggled to open my eyes, squinting. I could hardly make out where I was. I could see some dim lights making a silhouette in front of me. I tried looking around but did not see much. My consciousness kept evolved. I recognized the dim light, now coming to focus as the small screen where a movie was on pause.
I rubbed my eyes as I adjusted myself onto the seat, the seatbelt restricting most of my movements. I was now fully back to normal. I was having a… having a… eh… a skymare! Yes a mare up there in the sky. I was glad it was just a dream.
I touched the pause button on the screen in front of my seat and the movie resumed. I heard the sound permeate through the headphones. I was back to watching a movie. Most of the others were still completely motionless, deep a sleep. But this did not take long. Soon there was a gentleman passing by the isle handing over hand towels to those awake. He handed one to me, which I used to towel my hands, then soon handed it back when he came back through his rounds. Another gent followed,
“Tea?,” he half whispered as he passed around.
Another whisper of “Coffee” would soon follow from some lady walking the isles with another trolley.
My movie indicated a remaining time of one-hour when the intercom interrupted all active screens, forcing them to freeze.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your first officer. We shall soon enter the Kenyan airspace and soon thereafter should be landing at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Thanks for choosing Kenya Airways.”
I remembered the drill. The captain speaks only once – when the plane is about to take off, then he is done talking. All other talking is the FOs work.
The frozen screens came back to life and I continued to enjoy the last hour of my movie. My cellphone on flight mode was still reading Sunday, November 10, 2019 at 4.35am, when the movie got finished. As I starting to browse around the movie channels, the unmistakable crackle of the intercom came through, “Cabin crew, prepare for landing”
This is usually a lie of course. It would take another ten minutes before the real landing happened. But maybe ‘prepare’ had no immediacy in it – just maybe prepare is just prepare.
A seven-minute taxiing welcomed us back home. You could feel the hot temperature already engulfing the plane though it was hardly seven. We disembarked. I had a good admiration of the first-class cabin. A 2-2-2 configuration. Those seats could be adjusted into beds. Their movie screens were gigantic! They seemed to have individual storage cabinets, and judging from the left-over glasses and bottles, they even seemed to have their own bartenders. I nodded in appreciation as I walked past this section and out to the exit near the cockpit for the long walk down the stairs. We had to wait briefly on the tarmac for our buses to get us to the terminal building.
The upstairs walk to passport control was a short trip, though I observed that ‘temperature’ screening was still active on an overhead screen above the walkway, just before passport control. A final arrival stamp was hit onto the passport after fingerprint scan, and that was all that it took to get back to the motherland. Waiting for the luggage was not long at all. We handed back all extra baggage to Oby and then left the terminal building. I was lucky enough to be pulled back by a KRA official at that last baggage scan facing the exit door.
“This bag looks heavy,” she said, having caught up with me just three metres to the exit door, “It must have material to declare. What is in it?”
I thought of just bolting off the three metres and out of the airport.
“I am just recovering from a skymare for crying out loud!,” I did not say, but instead said, “I just have clothes and books… I am a student from schooling.”
Wanjawa,W.B., Nairobi, Kenya
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