After a disappointing walk around the Lokka district we went back to the hostel and ate at the restaurant underneath it. We collected our luggage and walked to the coach station, going through the train station and shopping centre we walked through when we arrived. My left eye had been pulsing on and off since the morning and suddenly I felt as if I was losing sight in it. I felt disorientated. We should have found somewhere to sit down but we continued to walk around the shopping centre, I wanted a souvenir – in particular a book by Kjell Askildsen. We went into a large bookshop. The place was crowded. My girlfriend seemed concerned and slightly distressed about my eye. Later I would buy eye drops and she would ridicule me saying they were just water. I bought a copy of Hundene i Tessaloniki and we went to the coach station.

My eye started to feel better as we sat and waited for the bus. We didn’t talk; we were both still tired from lack of sleep and walking all day. Had we known what awaited us when we reached the airport – a cancelled flight, having to wait until the morning for the next plane, trying to sleep in an area suddenly invaded by passengers from an incoming plane, trying to sleep inside a photo booth then finding an area with empty sofas then being kept up by a small child wailing in either sadness or tiredness or joy – we might have tried sleeping right then. The coach arrived and I showed the driver my ticket with the writing on the back. He seemed surprised but okay with the idea. We took a seat near the back of the coach and my girlfriend started listening to my CD player. After the coach got moving and we exited Oslo passing various sites we had walked around at street level, I asked my girlfriend what she was listening to. Fugazi, she said. I knew it was the album The Argument. It was my CD. Do you have an Epic Problem? I said. She made a worried expression and said, I’ve just had one.

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