Amsterdam to Nairobi

    By far the longest leg of my journey was from Amsterdam to Nairobi.  Days before I left, I had been contemplating seat selection for my flights.  As you know, nowadays one has to pay for a selected seat, ANY selected seat, and I decided there was only one leg of the whole trip I was serious enough about to fork out the requisite $25--Amsterdam to Nairobi.
    Why?  Well, one time I flew from Amsterdam to Johannesburg and had the most remarkable flight ever.  Flying over, first, the Alps, then the Mediterranean, and then the Sahara was fantastically scenic and interesting, and I hoped for more of the same.
    Imagine my dismay, then, when I arrived at my seat and found some one sitting in it!  Under normal circumstances, I would have simply deferred, but when I remembered I had actually PAID for that seat, I decided to stick to my guns.  The lady in my seat was astonishingly over-dressed.  She was clad in what surely looked like a mink coat, and over the top of that she wore a substantial down vest.  These were over what appeared to be "traditional" African dress and heavy boots.  I surmised that she was trying to wear everything she couldn't cram into her luggage.
    Her English was rather rudimentary, but she finally realized what I was saying about the seat and, rather ill-naturedly, moved.  We were the only two in the three-seat row, but she elected to sit right next to me, and man!  With all those clothes, she took up a LOT of space and exuded a LOT of heat.  Plus, she had a very nasty cold and coughed long, hard, and often--and without the benefit of covering her mouth.  I sat there, feeling trapped, and fuming about how sick I was going to get.  
   It turned out to be totally cloudy anyway, and I couldn't see a damn thing, so, generous soul that I am, I eventually got up to visit the toilet and then offered her the window seat and then sat myself in the aisle seat and was quite comfortable.
    Until, that is, they handed out the customs declaration forms.  I didn't need to fill one out since I wasn't disembarking in Nairobi, but she did.  It became clear that she couldn't read the forms, and she asked for my assistance and advice.  She seemed to be nervous about some "medicine" she was carrying, but her nerves subsided after she made a judicious trip to the toilet (and presumably its wastebasket.)  Then we became quite chatty.
   It turned out that she had been working as a housekeeper in Canada for the past couple of years, and now she was going home.  She was able to tell me how phenomenally cold it had been in Canada and how excited she was to be returning to Kenya.  I imagined that she had been given somebody's old mink coat and down jacket and that she was prepared to really wow her family and friends back home.
    So we parted on good terms after spending a "mere" 14 hours together, and now I will never see her again.  I find myself wondering how she is and what her friends DID think of that fur coat.