Just a quick post here. Flew in yesterday morning to Fiumicino airport outside Rome, after leaving Banjul International Airport the evening prior around 7:00. Lamin got me a private vehicle to go there, so all I had to pay for was gas, which still wound up being a couple hundred dalasi, but whatever. Really good flight, but the transition in Brussels was almost too close. You’ve got to go through immigration there even if you’re just connecting to another flight, and I got stuck in a slow lane. Unfortunately, it appeared that the slow lane appeared to be slow because I was in the line with all the Gambians and Senegalese folks, and the immigration officer was being extremely thorough with their checks of their papers. Had to cut to the front of the toubab line (the lines weren’t forcibly segregated, it just happened that way) so I could catch my connecting flight. As it was, I just made it to my gate as they were doing the boarding call. 15 minutes later we were pulling out onto the runway. Close.

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To maintain sanity, it’s important to occasionally take your routine and, as it slowly hardens into a fixed and immutably rigid structure, strike it with a blow of sufficient force to shatter it to pieces. This isn’t to say you should throw away what you have and start over from scratch (although that is always an option), but rather that you should “mix things up” every now and again, allowing those component pieces to reallocate themselves into a different and perhaps more interesting configuration. Variety is the spice of life.
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