It was only a few days before my trip to Swaziland. I had met Dechi early in the morning to donate blood together, in memory of a friend of mine from WK, and then we had met Emilse to watch Woody Allen’s newest movie.
After the movie we walked under the rain and stopped at a bookstore, where Dechi made a good point: shouldn’t I get some bibliography on Argentina to take to the meeting in Swaziland?
I decided to give it a shot, and we went into one of these bookstores-that-sell-everything-but-books place. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating… it was more a bookstore-that-sells-books-but-also-sells-a-lot-of-other-crap-so-it’s-hard-to-find-the-book-you-want bookstore.
We spent around 5-10 minutes laughing at the load of biographies of people whose lives we couldn’t care less about. Some were too ridiculous, some even offensive.
We then moved to the second floor, and after bypassing the DVDs and music CDs, the toys and so on, we got to the books on Argentina. They were amazing, huge, hard-cover books in full color. The price was even huger. I looked around to ask Dechi if it was worth spending so much on a book that was not only expensive but also incredibly bulky and heavy.
But Dechi wasn’t around. She was at the children’s book section, trying to find Waldo with Emilse. I walked toward them, a bit frustrated. Of course, my frustration lasted the 4 seconds it took me to get to the children’s section. Oh, I love children’s books! And Where’s Waldo?… who doesn’t love that book? It’s amongst the most useless books in the planet, yet so much fun! In fact, I tried to look all grown-up and 
give Dechi and Emilse a patronizing look, yet as soon as I saw all those red and white and blue colours around (if you think it has an implicit pro-American message, you might be on the right track!), I went back to when I was 6 and started looking for Waldo, full of joy!
After a little while, I found a pile of boxed books laying next to us. They were a special edition of The Little Prince (a book that happens to be my all-time favorite). I picked it up and opened it in the first page. Emilse and Dechi commented on how they loved that first part about the drawing of a boa that had eaten an elephant but looked like a hat, and I remembered an anecdote from when I was back in Waterford Kamhlaba.
Chiara and I were preparing a little birthday card for Serge, a friend who also loves the book. We hitchhicked down to town to buy some stationary to make a nice card featuring the Little Prince, and we were picked up by our English teacher. We told him about the idea and he also proclaimed to be a big fan of the book. And when we asked which part was his favorite, he said that it was the part with the boa and the elephant. Chiara and I looked at each other and wondered if the teacher had ever actually read the book. Yeah, the first part is very good. In fact, the whole book is a masterpiece, there is no single part of it that is not meant to be quoted forever and ever. But it was just funny for us that he had picked that part out of all the other, more profound, emotional events depicted futher in the book, and we really thought that it was because he hadn’t really read it, or at least that he couldn’t remember beyond the first couple of pages (yes, we were mean, prejudiced girls.. :-s)
Anyway, I told my friends about this episode (and I think they also agreed that I was prejudiced…) and then we spent some time discussing the book, especially this part of the boa and the goddam, freaking elephant (sorry, I got a little impatient over there) and then we also discussed the new and sudden popularity around a series of vampire novels… and then we left the bookstore, empty-handed.
We walked Dechi and waited till she got on her bus and then I walked Emilse to another bus stop, closer to my house. On the way there, we found a weird graffiti on the pavement, one that I had never seen before: the image of the boa ressembling a hat, from The Little Prince.
The next day I met Dechi for a coffee and she told me that on the way back to her house she had seen the weirdest graffiti on a wall. You guessed right, it was the same image we had seen, and she had thought about me and my fascination for these coincidences, but never guessed I had actually seen it too, probably at the same time as her but in different places. We were, as usual, terribly amused by such an unusual event.
That same afternoon, as I entered my house, I found this on the wall next door:
:-o
Really? Really! 
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