The cafe with five faces, p.9
The Café with Five Faces, page 9
2018: 18: Granada: The Cons of Standing Out in a Crowd
In a summer like the one of 2018, the outdoor space was as hard to resist for the staff, mainly me, as it was for my customers. Matthew, Mark and Lois were clearly out of work but with some spare cash – in other words, the perfect clientele. In the heat of summer, one’s mind often turns to travel. With Matthew, Mark and Lois, it seldom turned to anything else and dodgy experiences were once again on the agenda.
“Do you always feel like a tourist when you’re abroad?” Lois sometimes sounded like a television interviewer with her questions, perhaps not surprisingly when this had been her ambition in her more youthful days.
“In some countries, never,” said Mark. “In Lebanon, for example, I’m often mistaken for being Lebanese and I always feel completely at home, at least in the Beirut and central coastal areas.”
“Same here,” added Matthew. “But sometimes, you just stand out like a sore thumb. I was in Tunis for a day or two a couple of years ago and was innocently heading to the souks for a quick look around when I was quite literally targeted by a local. I don’t think I was looking too helpless, but he decided I was in need of his assistance. It started with an innocent question like, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Manchester,’ I replied as I always do when I’m travelling because no one has ever heard of my home town. ‘Oh, my cousin lives there,’ was the response and, like a fool, I was temporarily hooked.”
“Familiar story,” said Lois.
“I didn’t realise how familiar, but more of that later,” Matthew responded with a wink. “Anyway, he followed me into the souk and by this time, I was a bit wary but I just couldn’t shake him off and then he said he had a friend who sold some nice stuff and he actually managed to make it sound tempting, so I went along.”
“Like the dipstick you are,” said Mark, a little unkindly.
“Well, gullible, maybe,” conceded Matthew. “Turned out his friend sold perfume, not spices as I had thought. I was complimentary about them but then made to leave. That’s when the pressure started. I pointed out I was travelling with hand luggage only and couldn’t take liquids. ‘Oh, no problem,’ they said. ‘Yes, problem,’ I said. I’m not always that easily duped,” he added with a nod to Mark.
“That reminds me of my one and only trip to Saudi Arabia,” Mark digressed. “I had just given a talk at a conference and I was presented with a ceremonial Saudi dagger by way of a thank you. I expressed some concern that it wouldn’t fit into my luggage and they told me to take it on board! Can you imagine the reaction of airport security if I had?”
Lois and Matthew laughed before the latter’s mind returned to the Tunisian souks. “Anyway, I managed to escape the shop, but not my guide. I then mentioned I would like to walk around at my own pace. ‘No problem,’ he said, and followed me. ‘On my own is fine,’ I said. ‘Just pay me then,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any cash,’ I said, almost truthfully. ‘I’ll come with you to the ATM,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a card on me,’ I said, a little less truthfully – actually, this was a lie. At this, he was a mixture of sceptical and angry and I realised, rather belatedly, we had strayed into some very quiet streets. Slightly fearful, I just turned and walked away.” He paused, while the others waited. “And then ran away.”
“That must have been quite a sight,” said Lois, trying to imagine a not very fit but fashion-conscious Englishman being chased through the narrow streets of a souk by a wiry Arab.
“He had probably underestimated my sense of direction and I did manage to find my way back, close to where we had started, although I was rather breathless. And there he was, as large as life, calling me a madman. I just got out of there as quickly as possible – in case he had more friends. It really spoiled my only free afternoon in Tunisia, though,” he concluded. And then re-started: “And then, when I was almost back at my hotel, an older man on crutches stopped me and asked me where I was from. ‘Manchester,’ I replied. And guess what he said?”
“Oh, my cousin lives there!” chorused Mark and Lois.
“I almost changed my mind to Birmingham to see if he had cousins there as well, but it seemed a little late, and perhaps rude, to forget where I was from,” Matthew went on. “And then he asked me if I wanted to go to the souks. Well, I had just walked twenty minutes at pretty full speed from the souks and he was on crutches, so I think it might have taken the rest of the evening and involved a missed dinner engagement had I accepted, although I really had no wish to see them again for fairly obvious reasons. I told him I had just been and left before I fell for another story or was asked to visit the nearest ATM!”
“And the moral of the story is, never believe a Tunisian who claims to have cousins in the UK,” summarised Mark.
“A bit of a shame for those who actually do!”
“Quite eventful for one afternoon,” Lois commented.
“Quite so,” said Matthew. “And then I got to the airport the morning after and realised I’d left my passport at the hotel reception. I’ve never come so close to missing a plane! I had to beg a taxi driver to take me back with genuinely the only remaining cash I had, and when we got back, the queues at security and customs sent me for my stress pills!”
“You got there, though?”
“Just. Literally, the last minute and the last person to board.”
“I had a really good time when I went to next-door Algeria,” said Lois, taking a swift geographical shift westwards. “I met some really nice, helpful people who took me and my friend to so many places, but in one case, they were only able to be helpful after the event. There’s a really old part of Algiers called the Casbah, which is a protected area so no one can actually renovate it. Some parts are really beautiful, some parts look like Andalucía, some parts are striking, and some parts are run-down and dirty. Not a place to wander around on your own, so we were told afterwards, especially if you are a couple of very obvious non-locals. But wander around we did.”
“So, were you threatened at all, or did you feel threatened?” asked Matthew.
“Actually, not at all, except when we got to the top of the hill and there were a couple of guys who looked like they’d just come from a terrorist training camp in the desert.” Lois smiled, presumably in the relief garnered by survival. “That’s when we realised we may have made the wrong choice, which colleagues at work confirmed the day after.”
“Oops!” Mark’s reaction was light-hearted in the circumstances. Dangerous situations often seem less dangerous in retrospect. “Talking of sore thumbs,” he continued, although Matthew and Lois had to cast their collective mind back a good few minutes to remember previous reference to a painful digit, “I was of the same description the weekend I acquired the nickname Manila Mark.”
Matthew and Lois laughed. “I presume because you visited Manila?” Lois enquired.
“Got it in one,” Mark affirmed. “I had a reputation at the time for taking any opportunity to travel absolutely anywhere and this was my first time in South East Asia, working on a summer school in Hong Kong. We had a three-day weekend and I was wondering what to do…”
“So, you obviously went to Manila,” Matthew said with an amused expression.
“As you do,” said Mark.
“Or at least as you do,” Lois butted in, also with a smile.
“It didn’t work out quite according to plan in several respects,” Mark continued. “The flights were only possible early Saturday and late Sunday, so it ended up as a two-day weekend after all. Then the flight was a little late leaving but even later arriving as it was held for an hour on the runway in Manila waiting for a parking place. When I finally got out of the airport, the traffic was so bad, I decided a taxi was pointless and started walking until I accepted the futility of a hike in the heat and got in a car. I think I finally arrived at the hotel at the end of the afternoon rather than the end of the morning.”
“Such a waste of time, but it’s happened to all of us at some time, I suppose,” commented Lois.
“There was a knock-on effect here though as well,” Mark went on. “Obviously, I decided not to lose the day completely so I set off on my intended walk around one of the districts, or rather shanty towns – Intramuros rings a bell.”
“Don’t tell me – smartphone there for all to see?” Matthew had an air of despair.
“This was 1997,” retorted Mark. “I didn’t even have a mobile!” He paused and took a drink, rather unusually of Georgian mineral water (and to allow both listeners and readers to recall the days when smartphones were unheard of). He then coughed rather apologetically before continuing. “However, I did get a little lost – it was an incredibly densely populated area – and I do remember standing on a pitch-black street corner at ten o’clock at night with a map in one hand and a rather expensive SLR camera in the other.”
“What an idiot!” I wasn’t sure whether Matthew or Lois spoke first, but the sentiment was shared, to Mark’s chagrin.
“I won’t bother arguing,” said Mark. “Although travelling all that way to spend the evening staring at the walls of a hotel wasn’t really a viable option either.”
“Fair point,” Matthew conceded, “although a nice restaurant would have presented a decent alternative. I hope the second day was more productive.” He could tell from his friend’s resulting expression that this was not how he would have described it. “So, what went wrong?”
“I paid to go on a tour to see the Taal Volcano as my hotel recommended it.”
“Sounds reasonable,” said Lois, although she was clearly wondering if a hotel building possessed the ability to orally interact.
“We travelled for a couple of hours there and back to a hilltop which looked down on the volcano.”
“Still sounds OK.”
“It might have been, had the fog been somewhere else other than between our hill and the volcano crater,” sighed Mark. “It was a complete waste of time without even a decent coffee.” I wasn’t altogether sure if the lack of coffee wasn’t more important. “And then on the way back, we stopped at some obscure factory which made buses, jeepneys or something. No idea why!”
“I sometimes think these places pay tour companies to pop in with their coachloads of often gullible tourists,” said Matthew. “I was taken to some very odd souvenir establishments in the middle of the Vietnamese countryside on the way to the destinations we had actually paid to go to.”
“Explains a lot!” Mark agreed.
“So, was there nothing good about the weekend at all?” asked Lois, returning to the matter in hand.
“Well, I suppose the rest of the day was better,” said Mark, a little more brightly. “I spent the afternoon walking around a mini-Philippines park. It’s the sort of thing I don’t usually enjoy, but after the hassle of the previous thirty hours, it was something of a welcome relief and it allowed me to see at least something of the country, even if it was in miniature! This is where the ‘sore thumb’ part was most obvious. Most Filipinos are short and swarthy with a full head of hair, so it’s fair to say I didn’t quite blend in.”
“You can say that again,” said Matthew.
“I didn’t quite blend in,” Mark obliged. “At one point, I was being followed by a large number of teenage girls…”
“That’s the stuff of dreams for you, isn’t it?” teased Lois.
“Not when they’re pointing me out to anyone who would listen, saying, ‘Look, tall white man with no hair,’ and dissolving into fits of giggles at every possible opportunity.”
Lois and Matthew smiled at each other, knowing that in times past, Mark had been more than a little sensitive about his lack of a thatch.
“Anyway, I was upped to first class going back to Hong Kong.” Mark brought the story of the weekend to a close with an apparent high. “I’d been walking all day, sweating like a pig and was wearing bright red Charlie Brown socks,” he added, somewhat spoiling the effect. “And the poor guy next to me had paid extra to sit there.” He shook his head in sympathy with the stranger’s obvious and rather odorous plight. His mind turned to brighter thoughts. “Can I have a Caprese salad, please, Chaelli?” Quite what took his mind from a first-class flight between Manila and Hong Kong with smelly socks to a Caprese salad puzzled me somewhat, but a sale’s a sale.
“Mmmm, make that two,” added Lois.
“And three.” Matthew made it a hat-trick.
The three were still talking about their seemingly never-ending bad travel experiences when I returned with three platefuls of Mozzarella di Bufala (or buffalo mozzarella, if you prefer), sliced vine tomatoes, drizzles of pesto sauce and shredded basil leaves with rocket, together with a pepper mill and a bottle of extra virgin olive oil. Listening to them, one could quite easily arrive at the conclusion that they had each suffered so many setbacks on the road, it was some wonder they bothered travelling at all. This time, Matthew was about to launch into full flight about America and it was a story not lacking in heartache and vitriol.
“It all started – and in a way ended – in Calgary,” he began. “I’d been in Canada for a week, experiencing probably the coldest weather ever, at least for me; I think it was minus thirty-five the week I was there, although strangely enough, it didn’t feel all that bad. Anyway, I had an onward flight to New York, where I was due to spend nine weeks working on two courses.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” Lois was teasing again, with her eyes wide open in what was intended to be an expression of innocence.
“Technically, yes, and this is where it was my fault, I know, but it doesn’t excuse what happened, really. I had to enter as a tourist, just like millions of others with ulterior motives. So, there I was, going through US customs in Calgary…”
“Isn’t Calgary in Canada?” I think Mark knew the truth in that question but was hoping to wind his friend up a little more.
“Obviously, but the US has some border posts in other countries, presumably to save illegals the bother of travelling and being rejected,” Matthew continued. “Anyway, for some reason or reasons unknown, the customs officer thought I was worthy of further investigation – they told me later I looked edgy.”
“Let me guess,” said Lois. “You were wearing all black and hadn’t shaved for a week.”
“Hardly the classic definition of edgy, is it?”
“The way you do it?” Lois shrugged with a touch of impertinence.
“Dodgy, maybe; edgy, not really!” Matthew briefly defended his honour before moving on. “I was sent to a room for a second interview, and waited, and waited, and waited. Because my flight time was getting close and I was due to meet a friend in New York who was flying in from London and wasn’t one for being left alone in strange airports for very long, I really did start to get edgy, which apparently made them even more suspicious. When I say ‘them’, what I really mean was this big black guy.”
“That’s a bit racist, innit?” Mark wasn’t used to his friends making such remarks.
“That’s just fucked-up PC-ism gone mad,” retorted Matthew in an even more unlikely response, which betrayed the anger he was apparently still feeling. “Black is no more racist than big is sizeist. They’re just descriptive adjectives! Anyway, I’m just trying to paint a picture. Think Mike Tyson on a bad day and make him mean. That was this pillock. I’m sure he had a mother and a father, and a wife and kids, who all thought he was wonderful and, at home, he quite probably was, but put that uniform on and all empathy with other members of the human race evaporated.”
Mark and Lois considered the image conveyed for a moment and decided further argument was uncalled for.
“So, after being questioned again and made to feel about two inches tall, they went through everything in my luggage, and I do mean everything from dirty laundry to private letters – I can’t actually imagine what I was doing with a letter! They took my USBs for investigation, read my personal diary and made jokes about it, and asked me loads of personal questions about friends in America, how much money I had in the bank and how much I earned every month and whatever. I obviously wasn’t prepared for any of this, being as innocent as the day is long” – knowing smirks were exchanged between members of his audience at this point – “but I answered honestly, even if I didn’t want to. Eventually, files on my laptop indicated what I intended doing in New York and, to cut a long story short, that was that, as they say.”
“Meaning?”
“I was refused entry and, to put the icing on the cake, I was fingerprinted for FBI records, lost all rights to visa waiver forever and warned I would face close questioning should I ever want to visit the US again – and really, would I want to? Talk about an over-the-top reaction!”
“Isn’t this the country we have a ‘special relationship’ with?” Mark asked the question, placing a certain ironic tone on the two key words.
“That’s a load of bollocks!” Matthew’s reply was lacking in ambiguity. “It really depends who’s in power at the time. It worked with Thatcher and Reagan, it even kind of worked with Cameron and Obama, but Blair was treated as an insignificant poodle by Bush, and May is treated with nothing short of contempt by the current imbecile.”
“Yeah, but if that happens to a Brit, what happens to citizens of countries with even less of a relationship of any kind?” Mark’s question this time was a genuine one.
“Well, I can tell you a little,” Matthew answered. “I’d already told the immigration mafia in Calgary that I was meeting my partner, Anna, in New York so they got her name and details off me and contacted JFK. I was able to text her and, luckily, she read the text when she landed in New York while she was still on the plane, so she was completely honest about the purpose of her visit, which probably saved her further American-inflicted humiliation. Nevertheless, she was taken to a room with others who were either being questioned further or deported, and interrogated using a lot of information clearly gleaned from the Calgary bunch – we were slightly illegal workers, not international terrorists, for God’s sake!”
