Seized by a sudden whim, she decided to take the rest of the summer off and head to whatever the first European city was that popped into her head. She’d been working hard at a dreary old office job for most of the last year, and felt she deserved to get away for a while. Her plan had one huge flaw, however. As it turned out, there was not a single seat available on any of the flights going to that city. There were no seats available on flights to her second and third choice cities, either. All the travel agents that she spoke to told her the same thing; she should have made her plans months ago.
In the end, she had been left with no choice but to change her travel plans somewhat. Instead of heading to a city of her choice, she wound up booking a flight to the only destination for which seats were available. That it happened to be the capital city of a tiny country she had never heard of before did not deter her one bit. She stuffed her suitcase full of girls shirts and shoes and other essentials, and off she went.
That, in brief, was how she landed in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere. No one, absolutely not one single one of the people that she had encountered since boarding the plane, was able to understand her language. As a result, she’d had a bit of a hair-raising moment when clearing customs. For some unfathomable reason, instead of stamping her passport and letting her through as she’d expected, the agent pointed to her Swarovski earrings and began gibbering in highly excited tones. Certainly, she thought, I must have broken some local custom or prohibition. But luckily, through a combination of sign language and crudely drawn illustrations of stick figures in what looked to be police uniforms chasing stick figures armed with what looked to be guns, the agent made it clear that he was only warning her about a problem with local thieves.
As she exited the airport, she realized that she had made a terrible mistake. The climate was not warm and cheerful at all. A blast of wind that felt like it had come directly off the polar ice cap blew up her skirts and sent them flying. Not only was the wind cold, it was rude! Firmly gathering her skirts around her, she flagged what she hoped was a taxi.
Luck was with her at last. The cab’s driver had been the only one to discretely look away during the wind’s antics. And, though he could not understand a single thing she said, he immediately recognized the name of her hotel when she pulled out her booking confirmation and waved around it in front of his face. After a twenty-plus minute ride that seemed more like a practice run for a Formula One event, she arrived safely, if somewhat shaken, at the hotel.
Undaunted, she arose the next morning and set out for the city-center. What awaited her there was one of those rare, life-changing moments, for everywhere she turned, in every shop window, were the most ornately designed, absolutely exquisite men wedding bands. When she whipped out her pocket calculator and did the math, she discovered that she could easily resell them at a five hundred percent profit margin back home.
That day, on a street out in the middle of nowhere, a new business came into the world. There still is not a single citizen of that strange little country who is capable of speaking a language other than the one that they were born to. But that does not bother our heroine. She prefers it that way, since it helps to keep where she gets her rings from a closely guarded secret. She has, after all, learned their language.