Post 22 - Best Laid Plans...

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Today, 5th February 2007 is a date that has been circled on my calendar for 2 months. It was the date that I was supposed to fly out to Geneva. Not only that, but it is also my travel companion's birthday. We had the day planned to a T. Finish work at 5, out for dinner (we had even picked the restaurant), then out to sample some of Geneva's nightspots, before retiring back to our executive apartments to sleep off the effects of our first night in Switzerland. Sadly things haven't gone quite to plan, and currently at 10pm, instead of being full of fine food and wine, I find myself shivering in a pokey, draughty, attic bedroom in a guest house in Aberdeen's Great Western Road, which I will be calling home for the next three weeks. My evening meal tonight consisted of a prawn salad from Asda which I ate from the packet with a plastic fork, some salt & vinegar Pringles and a bottle of Diet Coke. For entertainment I played Football Manager and watched Ghostbusters.

My hostess is an elderly Chinese lady who asks questions in broken English, clearly doesn't understand your reply, then carries on the conversation using what she just thought you might say as your reply. Like tonight, she asked me If I had stayed here before. I replied that I hadn't and she, a little too quickly, exclaimed, good! You'll know where everything is then! A similar situation occured when we talked about what I do for a living, which he had already mind her mind up was the oil industry, and despite me telling her otherwise, she still thinks that.

My surroundings, by all accounts, are similar to Kai's in Craiginches. Upon opening my door there is a single bed pushed up against the wall which takes up most of the room, a little worktop with a chair and a TV on it which takes up the rest of the room, and a washbasin in the corner with a toothbrush holder. At 5'8" there is just room for me to stand up without bashing my head on the sloped walls. There is one skylight which is open just a crack, and despite my best endevaours, refuses to close or open any further, stoically remaining steadfast, and open just enough to let all the heat out and all the noise in. The walls have no less than three different patterns of wallpaper. And perhaps most worringly there are two cupboard doors built into the walls which are crudely sealed shut with masking tape. My supicious mind cannot help but wonder if that is to keep people from getting in to the loft, or from getting out...

Executive apartment this ain't, but with my Playstation set up, the sink full of stubble and shaving foam, and my dirty discarded clothes strewn across the floor, this is starting to feel like home already. All I need now is a drunken flatmate to stumble in drunk, piss all over the floor and call me a cocknose and it'll be like I never moved out.

Song currently stuck in my head - "My girl want's to party all the time, party all the time, party all the time...."
dissolvoray@hotmail.co.uk