One of the most difficult decisions to make when travelling alone is whether to accept invitations to dinner. Risk of accepting is.. you know what. And ‘risk’ of not accepting is you miss out chance to see the city.
I travelled alone to Lusaka and was there only for a night. Badly want to see the city before I left the next day. Perhaps it was a wrong decision as the invitation sounded really attractive – a car which could fetch me around the city (oh silly girl!!). We met at Livingstone and he was the Director of one of the pharmaceutical companies. I gave his number to the friend I stayed with and they met before he took me out so I thought it should be fine.
Contrary to what I thought we went to his house instead of a restaurant. It was so stupid of me to try to be polite and entered the house to find nobody else was in the house. To say I wasn’t panicking was a lie. I felt into my bag and found I forgot to bring the rape alarm along. This guy was really a weirdo. The first thing he saw me was his son’s pictures. Oh I thought perhaps he wanted to match-make me with the son or just to show off how handsome his son is.. that’s better. But after that he started asking a string of questions about me, without revealing the intention why he asked those questions. I was feeling really uneasy but appeared calm enough to start saying things that could be as bitchy as possible. I was aiming for the door for escape at any minute!
It was excruciatingly painful to stay in the house for one whole hour before he finally said we should go pick up some friends for dinner. Perhaps I was too sensitive (but I never was too sensitive!) but this guy really freaks me out. I even started to think about the movie ‘lovely bones’ where a silly girl was murdered mercilessly just because of her curiosity to look at the house of her murderer..
After one hour that felt like one thousand years we finally left the house without me being murdered (phew!).. We picked two other guys up from their house and went for an Indian restaurant. There things became much better. We had good conversation and I was rather convinced that these guys felt isolated from the rest of the world after living in a country ‘with very slow pace’ for some years. So they always want to speak to somebody from outside of the country to find out what’s going on currently in the world. I also learned from their experience living in both Francophone and Anglophone African countries. We shared some similar observations but they told me about Francophone African countries was something I haven’t heard of. Food was good – I have no doubt the dinner was really good.
Then we dropped these two friends off before sending me home. He gave me a ‘goodbye’ embrace and three ‘kisses’ which I had to fight against.. before I fled from the car..!
I will never be so stupid again – never ever enter a house if you don’t feel safe! Don’t try to be polite!
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