19th and 20th of November, 2020.
I take my seat at the window. A lady sits at the isle an tells me, pointing to the middle sit: “I am actually here but, if nobody takes this seat, I will remain in here.” In front of me, I say this beautiful young woman, with her baby, and a man I assume it is her husband. She has a gorgeous black skin. I also assume that she is from UK and it might be going back home.
When people finally start to take their seats and shut up a little (the flight is completely full and now the nice lady beside me took the middle seat), I manage to overhear the lady in front of me talking with her husband. They are speaking Portuguese! She is definitely from Brazil but he is not. I wait until we take off and then I say to them, in Portuguese, speaking in between their seats – You should not speak Portuguese out loud like that, some Brazilian might hear you and you know how they are. Luana laughs and say: “I do not believe this!”, but in Portuguese, of course. So our conversation goes on.
They leave in London now but before they were living in Rome. Elton, her husband, is from Albania but they met in Rome, when he was already living in there and she was travelling. They have this fabulously handsome boy, Zion, who smiles gorgeously all the time. I quickly tell them about my trips and my plans. Luana is very kind and says she is happy to meet someone who is doing something like that and I even inspired her to travel more.
At some point, the lady sitting beside me says that she does not speak Portuguese but she understood everything we were talking about it. She is from Albania too and she is going to visit her family who lives in the UK. We also talk a bit briefly and she confessed to me to be a little scared because it is the first time she is travelling abroad since the beginning of Covid-19.
In less than three hours we are landing. The time passed so fast that I could barely notice. Of course not free snacks or drinks.
Before we could leave the plane though, the captain makes an announcement that the police is coming aboard to look for one passenger. The police officers, all dressed up with bulletproof vests and covered with police devices, get in the place and walk towards the tail. They leave without the passenger, so we can only assume it means he had changed his seat. The captain makes another announcement, this time asking for the passenger, using his name, to present himself, otherwise nobody will leave. When the police come back again, apparently there is some resistance but they managed to take the man. Who is stupid enough to resist an arrest against three police officers inside a plane?
I say goodbye to my new friends. They all have my blog address and I hope they can keep in contact.
We are in the queue for non-EU. I see the police officer at the cabin let it go about twenty people without asking them any questions, just have a quick look at their faces and passports and that is it. And the guy just in front of me does not even speaks English because when the police officer asked him his nationality he could not understand and answer. But unfortunately I am the one who that police officer decide to pick for christ, as we say in Brazil.
When he sees I am from Brazil he first asks: “What are you coming to do in here, is Brazil not good enough for you?”. Questions to each I wanted to answer with this question – What are you doing here, is India not good enough for you? – since I can tell by looking at his features that he is definitely second or third generation of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh… But of course I remain calm and just keep answering his questions. He is completely unprofessional in all his questions. He does not ask me for any documents or proves of what I am saying. His questions are only personal enquires of why I came back to the UK and not any of these other countries I have been travelling for the last four years, and then he start to name some of them, reading from the stamps on my passport. Now, you see, a person, who acts in such unprofessional way, even worse for being a police officer, strikes me as someone who cannot put apart his personal feelings of his professional duties. And in my personal opinion, his reason for having picked me for torture can be only two: either he secretly wants to travel the world, but with his police salary cannot, so he is jealous of me and cannot understand how I manage; or, a much more simple one, a Brazilian person broke his heart and now he hates us all. At some point he even say: “You will have to convince me that I can let you enter”, or something like that, meaning that, it was not a matter of me entering the country completely legally and with all the legal procedures done, no, the only important thing was I convincing him, his ego, that I deserve to enter the country. Of course I also believe it has something to do with the refuges problem. Many citizens condemn the government position, paying for so many refugees to stay and live in the UK. But since those citizens cannot (or mainly do not want) do anything about it, they turn their anger towards the people they can reach: whoever foreigner is entering the country and they have knowledge of it.
With my entering stamp on my passport I take a seat on the lounge just in front the exit door. I now have to wait until 6 a.m. for the bus to London. I eat, I change and I try to rest a bit, lying down in the very uncomfortable seats, which are made of metal and separated by metal bars.
I am waiting the bus just a few minutes before its arrival. A driver, from the bus just beside where mine should arrive, starts to talk to me. He is from Luton and he is very friendly and respectful with me. To be honest, and I think that is because the jerk immigration officer, I am surprised. I tell him quickly that I have been travelling on my own for the last 4 years and some stuff. Just before he leaves, he asks to the security guard, who is talking with another driver, to take care of me because I am a very nice lady. Owm! You see, that is why I always say you cannot generalize about people and their countries.
I take the bus to London. It is just me and a couple. We change buses in the middle of the way and I am guessing it was because of the lack of travelers. At Victoria Coach Station I wait for a few hours until the bus arrive. I manage to be the first one boarding so I get a good seat in the window. It rains a little. I try to rest but in vain.
I arrive in Leeds around 2 p.m. and wait just a few minutes for the local bus number 6 to get into Fergus’ house.
It takes me several minutes to find the key but I finally manage. I quickly drop my backpacks inside, take a look in what kind of food they have so I don’t need to buy. I empty my small backpack and grab one shopping back, so I go to the supermarket.