2

As Taeyeon sang her “I” into my ear (it’s a song), I sat in the plane reflecting on the past few days and everything that had happened. I met a group of supposedly awesome people that I got along with swimmingly, only to find out that only one of them was an honest person worth staying in contact with.

While I was reflecting and contemplating life, I had begun repeatedly coughing as a result of the cup noodles getting stuck somewhere down my throat. I know, attractive, isn’t it?

The friendly man, whom I had estimated to be around his mid-40s, sitting next to me, started to wake up and proceeded to rummage through his carry-on bag. He had dark brown hair and a mustache so voluptuous, that it could pose as a primetime contender for having other men in its presence come down with a strong case of beard envy. A moment later, his head popped back up triumphantly. He held out his hand to me and in it was a small white and sort of translucent candy.

“For your cough.” he said, giving me a concerned smile.

It took me a moment to realize what was going on.

When I finally did, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I wasn’t actually ill and that I merely failed at eating sometimes. I figured it doesn’t hurt to keep some non-essential truths to yourself once in a while. So I simply replied with a “Thank you!” and stuffed the round little pebble into my mouth.

“Where are you from?”

I asked, not in an attempt to successfully get some small talk going but because I’m generally always interested in people’s origins and pasts.

“Sorry?” He replied, “My English is not that good”.

After I repeated the question, I found out he was from Spain and I delightedly started whipping out my Spanish skills.

Unfortunately, he was not one to talk about simple topics, so I ended up attentively listening to his theories on the loss of cultures all around the world due to Americanisation and colonialism and how in the end there will only be one culture left which will be a sort of mixture of all the cultures we have nowadays and that, of course, there would only be one language remaining, which would be spoken all around the world.

Thanks to the language barrier, I understood maybe 70% of his theory, so if he’s reading this, I’m sorry if I didn’t summarize it quite correctly.