When you travel for work you find yourself sitting alone in the hotel bar in the evenings. It is a sad experience to be honest, especially for someone like me who hates drinking alone. Of course, I can choose to have soda water but that would be psychotic, wouldn’t it?
Lone grown man at the bar drinking a soda water for an hour, staring into space, his lips moving and often sighing loudly and muttering, ‘save us all.’ Yeah, definitely psychotic. So, I normally have a whisky after dinner, which I prefer to call a digestif.
Somehow, I almost always stay at the Park Inn when I’m in Kigali, Rwanda. They have a short bar which can get crowded just before dinner. It has a few long stools, maybe about six or so. Yesterday evening I came down from my room for a drink at the bar.
I was meeting a writer who I had been emailing for a few months now. She was waiting at the bar. I approached a lady at the bar and said, ‘hey, Biko, finally so nice to meet you.”
She was beautiful as most Rwandese ladies tend to be. She smiled and indicated the stool next to her. She had a heavy French accent or something, sipping on a cedar.
Small talk, niceties. Then she said, “you look tired, did you have a long day?” and I said, I did. I was wiped. She then said, ‘I can give you a massage.” Now, that knocked me off my seat. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I was revolted, I’d be a barefaced liar.
But I was taken aback because it was very upfront and unexpected given the “professional” conversations we had been having. But she said it in a French accent. Have you ever been asked in a French accent, ‘I can give you a massage?”
To recover, I checked my messages and the person I was meeting had texted me asking, ‘did you get lost from the lift?’ I turned to see a lone lady seated by a window.
