Flying In The Sky

The roaring engines of the huge Boeing shook perhaps every seat on board. Nonetheless, a little girl of African origin who was sitting next to me was more captivated by a Walt Disney film that was being broadcast on the screen fixed into the seat in front of her.

The air inside the Turkish Airlines plane was full of palpable tension. We were all awaiting the moment of take-off from Istanbul airport and our heading towards the biggest metropolisof Eastern Africa.

You have a feeling like you get when you travel to the football world championship – here are white people with European accent, a few black women in branded jackets, large happy families of well-off Africans and also a group of Czech guys who want to see the world in a bit different way.

Maybe, if we dedicated our time to playing football instead of running, we would make our country more famous by participation in a championship.

You exchange a few words now and then with a congenial African man of a calm and lettered expression on his face, who is sitting next to you and is asking you whether you could help him start a new version of The Magnificent Seven starring Denzel Washington.

You would never think that a person of such appearance doesn’t know how to control a remote control, and is laughing at himself like a small child. I also started to laugh up my sleeve when he told me that he had kept the headphones from the previous flight and was disappointed that he couldn’t plug them in without an adaptor, which he had realized after short international consulation.

Contemplating whether the infamous massive differences between the rich and the poor in Africa are true, my thoughts are interrupted by the sight of a father wrapping his daughter into a warm blanket from head to toe and lovingly caring for her.
We all got blankets of the same size, and the young lady looked cute covered in her sleeping bag which revealed only a few plaited locks of her hair which are full of colour.

Inspite of the fact that they are both wearing stylish clothes that even a chief of the biggest European bank wouldn´t be ashamed of wearing, I am surprised how fluent in English this four-year-old girl is.
Then I think that social status separates people all over the world, in the same way that a common language and direct and sincere interpesonal relationships put them back into balance.

We are going to cross the ocean in a few hours and step on the hot ground of the African continent.

Yesterday´s -15 degrees Celsius and 15 centimetres of fresh snow are going to be replaced by a 40-degree-warmer temperature, and the memory of long traffic jams caused by snow calamity and stress from 15-minute-delayed arrivals to the bus station will only be a blurred memory.

Before passangers immerse themselves into their own thoughts and the cabin becomes quiet, this little girl interrupts the aerodynamic noise with words:

“Dad, we are flying in the sky, aren’t we?”

Interesting matters

The first chapter on the voyage of discovery to equatorial Africa Flying in The Sky was written on Thursday, 12th January while travelling from Olomouc (the Czech Republic) to Nairobi (Kenya). We had a lot of fun recording short videos with surprise gags. They have been stored in our videoteque and we are thinking of publicizing them…