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.
Put in a nutshell, that is how she wound up in the middle of a country where nobody, not one soul, could speak her language. This resulted in something of a heart-stopping moment when the customs agent examining her bags suddenly gave her the strangest of looks. He gestured towards her Swarovski earrings and began jabbering excitedly in his own language. At first she thought that she must have violated a local regulation by wearing them, but through some rudimentary sign language and crudely drawn pictures depicting stick-figures carrying guns being chased by other stick figures in police uniforms, the agent was able to communicate that he was only warning her about local thieves.
The moment that she stepped outside the airport, she knew that she had made a terrible mistake. She had packed light, summery clothing when the climate was anything but. An icy blast blew her skirts up almost over her head, delighting some of the male travelers who had been with her on her flight, and who were now flagging cabs or being picked up by relatives. She clutched her skirts about her, and resolutely stepping in line for one of the waiting cabs.
Her luck appeared to be changing at last. Her driver not only appeared to have been looking elsewhere when the wind behaved so rudely, he also recognized the name of her hotel from the printed out confirmation that she waved under his nose. After twenty heart-stopping minutes spent racing along a highway on which every driver seemed to be testing their Formula One racing skills, she arrived at her hotel a bit shaken-up, but none the worse for wear.
She awoke the next morning, and completely undaunted by the previous day’s experiences, headed straight into the city center. It was there that she experienced her life-changing moment. It was one worthy of being accompanied by a choir of angels singing ‘hallelujah’. For, no matter where she looked, in each and every shop window were great, heaping displays of the most absolutely exquisitely designed men wedding bands. She immediately whipped out her calculator and after doing the math, discovered that they could easily be resold at a profit margin of more than five hundred percent back home.
The city located out in the middle of nowhere gave birth to a completely new business that day. The locals still don’t speak a word of any language but their own. Our heroine, who likes to keep her source a secret, considers that a plus. In no time at all, she managed to learn their language.