Hattie (now deceased) was going to Prague with her German friend, Irmtraud, over the Easter long weekend. Irmtraud was staying with her Czech boyfriend, and he had arranged for his British friend, Steve, to put Hattie up. I then decided to tag along last minute, and Steve was happy about me sharing Hattie’s room.
The Czech boyfriend came to the airport to pick us up in his car. This was around midnight, as Hattie caught the last plane in (I’d arrived in the morning, and spent the day at the airport, revising for my Linguistics exams), so it was all dark when we arrived at Steve’s block of flats. Across the street were two big wheelie (rubbish) bins. The Czech boyfriend pointed at them and said to us, “There, that’s your accommodation for your stay!”
Two nights later, Hattie and I got tickets for the opera. After the post-opera meal, we took a taxi back to Steve’s. Steve’s residential area is made up of parallel streets off the main road from the airport, with another road at the other end of those streets, running parallel to the main road. The taxi driver had said he knew our street, but had turned off the main road a street too early. So, he got to the end of that (wrong) street, up the parallel road, and turned into our street, this time heading towards the main road. As soon as he got to our block, I saw the two wheelie bins, and said to him, “That’s it, that’s our block.”
I’d only seen those bins once before, on the night we arrived at midnight from the airport. We’d approached the block of flats from the main road then, but they’d somehow just stuck in my brain screen, so that I could even identify them from the other side.
(Prague, 1993)
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