June Strangers

Right so the month of June has been over for a while now I know, but I'm only just coming to terms with the fact that summer is over. It proper hit me today when walking home from a lecture I didn't understand on the economy, in Belfast's best wind and rain. Miserable. But somewhat expected.

We tend to think back on our lives in terms of the people in our social spheres. People who are close to us. People who drift from us. People we don't like. People we can relate to. We hardly ever take into account those who are unknown to us. We acknowledge their existence, but we do not remember them.

At the beginning of the month of June, I met quite a few interesting strangers, which is why I decided to keep track of them all for a month. I wrote a few notes down at the time but am only getting round to putting a blog together now, when I actually have better things to do. The point? To account for a few of those I would normally forget all about within 24 hours.

- I was on my way home from having had lunch with Josh. This elderly woman with a walking stick and crazy teeth got on and decided she was going to sit on the seats that were highest from the ground. She got a bit stuck, hanging somewhere between her chosen seat and the floor in front of it. I shouted across the bus asking if she needed help. She screamed YES. I threw down my ipod, phone and bottle of diet coke and rushed to help her. Not as easy as I'd hoped. Frail elderly women are heavy. Another guy had to come over and help out too. He was rather attractive so his assistance was welcomed for many reasons. We finally got her onto the seat, she mentioned something about us having to go through this when we were her age as well. We chuckled. And went back to our ipods and phones and diet cokes.

-Danya and I were sat in Plainpalais sipping pints and catching up on some outside tables one evening, when the woman sat at the next table started talking to us for about half an hour. Her name was Anne and her eyes wondered a little. She was about 30. Actually she was 29, as she mentioned something about having been 19 ten years prior to the conversation. Anyways, she was a little drunk, would have able to beat me up if she wanted to considering her build and was Swiss through and through. She was rather chatty, telling us about the jewelry course she was on and how she went traveling a lot in her youth and was a hobo for 10 years and how she always wanted to get out of geneva and how she always wanted to find 'the one' and how she found someone and had a kid but how she hated how much he loved her and how tied down she felt and how she wanted to break free of it all but that she wasn't the kind of person to do that and that we should make the most of being free and single and not settle down ever! Then she moved on to the people sat on the other side of her.

- Short, drunk, homeless man with a Father Christmas beard, only it was a dark beard not a white one. In fact, he looked EXACTLY like J. K. Rowling's description of one of those goblins in Harry Potter who guard Gringotts bank. Only fatter. Not much taller though. He was stumbling round the bars asking for money. I spared him some loose change. He kissed me on the shoulder. Tit for tat I guess.

- Zambian man. He overheard us speaking English and proceeded by asking where we were from. After my response he said 'Your country colonised mine'. I appologised. He walked away.

- Mr. G's dog. Walking back up to the station with Jiwan and Dustin after having watched Australia get smashed by Germany. A dog caught our attention. It had no back legs and therefore had a 'wheelchair'. A weird contraption was strapped around its lower body with wheels attached to it, whereby it pulled itself around. Its owner was German and had four other dogs with her. She was friendly. Ja.

- One of the highlights of the month of June, possibly one of the best moments of the whole summer, was when the Swiss took Spain on and won! The low-light was when the Honduras match was played and the result meant the short-live Swiss glory was over. Thais and I were sat in Brasseurs as per usual for the game. At the next table were sat the most improbable threesome. One was a giant. He was from Nigeria and had become a successful businessman in Geneva. He looked and dressed however as though he had lived on the streets for decades, and was quite intimidating. The second was a scrawny white-boy aged 20 who didn't even need to tell us he was Swiss. The spiked up hair he should have grown out of when he was fourteen, the silver chain around his neck and matching one around his left wrist engraved with his name gave his nationality away at first glance. The third did not speak to us, in fact I am not convinced he even spoke to other two. He was French, at least I think he was considering he was dressed like a chav from Marseille, and was the only person in Geneva obnoxiously cheering for Honduras. The Nigerian was endlessly purchasing Colones of beer, and kept snatching our glasses and filling them to the brim. As soon as the match drew to a regretful close, Thais and I rushed out of there, much to the disappointment of the ones we left behind who were clearly hoping to get something from us in return.