[b][/b] Culled from www.woahnigeria.. Also follow me on Twitter @EscoWoah

After the last checking point, I got ushered to the departure lounge. Everywhere was really full, as everybody in Lagos seemed to travelling on that night. I saw some girl I had gone to school with, and she came over to say hi. Then she asked me where I was headed. Before I could answer, she said she was going to Jand for a week, and then going on a girl’s holiday with her mates to Holland. Good on her. But I wondered to myself, whether Holland wasn’t a better destination for guys?

I then realized that I was just being stereotypical -in Nigeria, sometimes people look at you funny if you say you are headed to certain countries for holidays. A girl I know once spun an atlas globe and decided to visit any country her finger landed upon. Thankfully, her finger avoided Bauchi State, Afghanistan and Libya and landed on sunny, zany Spain. She was single so she was travelling alone. She said that on the plane, people raised their eyebrows a bit when she told them that she was a single young woman on a holiday trip to Spain from Naija. Everyone thought she must be going there to sell sex in Barcelona. I am Ibo, and I cannot say I am travelling to China or Singapore without people thinking I must be a spare-parts dealer. And when I tell people I want to travel to Yankee, they always assume my destination is Texas. Ibos go to Montana and Maine too, you know.

I and my ex-classmate exchanged Naija numbers before she bounced.

Getting spots to sit down was hard, and some people had to stand until the announcement to board. The announcement came finally, and I boarded the plane and snapped on my belt.

I had an aisle seat in the middle row, so I was silently praying that the person next to me would not be a woman with a cry-baby or meddlesome toddler, a very huge person who would over-lap into my seat space or a sleeper who snores.

Then a lass walked up to my seat, and when I looked up, it was someone I knew as well. What a coincidence! She squeezed past me, and sat on her seat exhausted. We chatted for a while; she said she was exhausted because she had worked till 7pm at her bank job, rushed through V.I. traffic to Apapa to pack up her stuff, and had to speed to traffic to get to Ikeja on time to make her flight.

By the time she had walked through the aircraft door, she was dead tired, and one of the air-hosts noticed it. After she explained her grueling day, he promised to look for and re-seat her at one of those seats which face a wall and have a lot of leg space. He told her to go to her originally assigned seat, while he would check if the alternative seat was available.

When she saw me, she decided to sit down at her seat for companionship. By the time the air-host came by to move her, she told him that she would prefer to seat next to me. Soon after the plane took off, this lass snoozed off into the deepest sleep I have ever seen anyone have. You know when some people doze off and their eyelids do not shut properly so it looks like they are having a fit? She only woke up to tell the air-hostess serving food a while later, that she preferred the chicken to the meat casserole. She took a few spoons, and fell back asleep, with the spoon in her mouth!

Omo, me sef come de fear small for the girl. You know how they used to do in the 80s. If a passenger slept too much on a plane, when you disembarked, immigration would call you aside for a full rectal search because cocaine smugglers usually slept a lot.

Ah, I had already made up my excuses in my head so I could deny knowing her if it came to that. I would say ‘Officer, I do not know this woman like that o. I have no idea why she carried Dusting Powder inside her nyash o”