“Well, darling, will you wait for me?”
A stocky obnoxious puffy guy with a flattened boxer’s face is talking on the phone, not paying any attention to me.
“What do you want for dinner? You don’t know? You don’t know what you want for dinner? Well, I’ll come over and we’ll figure something out, okay? I’ll be on my way in another half hour. So what. You gonna wait?”
I didn’t find out what happened. I didn’t dare ask, as a conversation opener. The car was filled with silence punctuated by Katy Perry’s insistent homosexual message “I kissed a girl and I liked iiiiit the taste of her cherry chapstick” which seemed quite incomprehensible in the context of the rather homophobic Uzbek society. If only the driver knew what we do in the Czech Republic… Ok, this topic is not a very good opener either. I don’t know, next. I’m flipping through the list of appropriate topics… weather awkward, marital status I don’t want to know, I don’t know the type of car, asking for name and age is weird… I give up. “It felt so wrong, it felt so right, don’t mean I’m in love tonight” sex squirts right out of Katy Perry’s voice and the air in the car is quiet enough to cut. “Is it 60 in here?” I ask confusedly on the four-lane highway in my garbled Uzbek and the driver turns to me with the brightest smile I’ve ever seen. How much a smile can change a face! “You speak Uzbek!” He has a smile across his face. “Well, I’m learning. For three years now. It’s a difficult language.” “Well, it sure is! I’ll tell my friends, no one will believe me. We all go away to learn some English and she comes here. You’re even paying for those lessons, aren’t you?” I hesitantly admit that I do. “Well, I don’t believe it!” He bursts out laughing. “That’s what I tell my friends! No one will believe me.” Then I guess I’m crazy. But I like being crazy. Suddenly the obnoxious boxer is a really nice guy.
