Ted Kerwin / CC
Since I was off last week, one of my projects was to just relax. Just sit back for a while and not do anything. Just relax. Maybe do some reading.
I like to read. Nothing really deep. Just your average novel to take you on a bit of an adventure. And while I don’t hang around a lot of thrift stores or second hand shops, my wife does. Looking for books. Usually looking to fill out series of books she likes to read and collect. But while she’s there, she may pick up something for me if it catches her attention.
And that’s what happened with this book. She’s not even sure what store she found it in. It might have been Frenchy’s. It might have been Value Village. Or it might have been any number of places that have used book racks. But somewhere in her recent travels, she found a novel she though I might enjoy.
So last week, I picked it up and started reading. It was interesting, but as I read along, a small slip of paper fell out of the book. It was a stub for an airline boarding pass. It looked rather interesting. A lot of characters in a language that was obviously not English. So you start to think of where it might have been. What travels had my book been on?
There was a flight number and the usual three letter codes for airports, so I had to look it up.
The flight was departing from BKK. I wasn’t familiar with BKK, so I checked that first. BKK is the code for Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, Thailand.
So we were flying from Thailand to somewhere. That somewhere was NRT. Turns out that NRT is Narita Airport in Tokyo. So my book left Bangkok and went to Tokyo.
In my mind, that doesn’t seem that far. Somehow the fact that these places are both far away from me should work out to them being close to each other, right? No. It’s a daily flight from Bangkok that leaves at 7:00 AM and arrives at 3:20 PM. So a person could read the best part of a novel while on a flight like that.
But now I want to know more of the story. Did this person just grab a novel while walking through the airport? Were they trying to appear nonchalant, while really on some secret mission? Had they just been chased through the streets of Bangkok by gangs of criminals, narrowly escaping to catch a flight to Japan?
And most importantly, how did a book that once took a flight from Bangkok to Tokyo end up on a second hand book shelf in Nova Scotia?
It became obvious to me that my book may have had a much more exciting existence than I have. I was sitting back, at home, putting my feet up for a couple hours. The book had travelled half way around the world to get to me.
I wish the story inside the book was half as exciting as they story I made up about the book.
