September 14, 2014

We were on a boat in the middle of a city and mountains. The people in the water were having a contest to see who can throw a ball filled with some kind of brown gel the furthest. I remember giving the girl in front of me a tip to make sure that the strap attached to the ball doesn’t hook onto her elbow when she threw it.

The boat now started moving and I noticed that we were seeing the upper halves of building around us. After we went a little further, I realized that we were actually on something akin to a highway of water. The man across from me asked if we liked dogs and the girl from before answered no. He replied that he was going to have lots of dogs with her once they got married and she was taken aback by this comment. I started to feel slightly uncomfortable listening in on this conversation and the person next to me asked if she felt a bit like a “lone wolf”. She replied, “yes, so what?”

I looked outside of the boat as I slowly ate my ice cream wrap. The place where we were about to go did not allow food on the premises. Furthermore all electronics (laptops especially) had to have battery when going through the security check.

We stopped in front of a building that we were going to tour. I think it was a kind of office building, probably something to do with immigration services. The tour guide led us to the bottom of the stairs and told us to wait.

“This tour is completely automated as much as our messaging system is” she explained. Behind her were a large number of mailboxes that received messages from above. There were long tubes and chutes that led to individual boxes. She opened a box and took out a stack of unopened letters. The one on top had “2010” written on the yellow envelope in blue ink.

She flipped through the letters until she found a white one with my mother’s name on it. Supposedly that was for our tour reservation.