Flight Home

I had taken seven flights already this vacation and was beginning to wonder why I hadn't met any flight 'neighours' to talk to and pass the hours. Just bad luck I figured: half empty planes, not English speakers, walkman wearers. On my BA flight back to China, however, I met a tipsy, 55 year old French man rather spontaneously when he cupped my ears with his hands and kissed me on my cheeks as we crossed paths at the plane bathroom. Later, when he popped up over the top of his seat and tapped my sleeping face, I realized he was in row 33 and me in row 32; which made him officially my neighbour. I would discover he too, was just the kind of neighbour to make up for my recent neighbour scarcity. He spoke French... fast and when I told him I didn't speak French, he would apologise, speak one sentence in indecipherable English, get excited, and switch back to French again without appearing to notice. It wasn't until 10 minutes of understanding only the words "peepee" and "je" that I suggested German and this was a tremendous communication barrier breakthrough for us and the only hope of our neighbourly relations improving. Then he talked even faster. Turns out, he had been telling me he was going to Beijing to 'peepee' off the Great Wall because he had nothing else to do; a retired professor of Cinema in Paris he was. He would be there for three days. A few months before, he had gone to Machu Picchu to smoke a cigarette at the top. He said a police woman told him by law he wasn't allowed to smoke at 4000 ft. He never mentioned if he had complied but he seemed like the kind of guy that probably would have pulled out his pack and proposed they enjoy the moment together. I never told him anything about myself, actually I never really spoke, but for the purposes of an airplane neighbour, he had enough to say for the both of us. It was a win win.