Work isn't a wolf, it won't run away.

International Dulles airport is a place I can now proudly call my second home. It was at this airport, an hour's drive from Washington, that I spent most of my summer working in a coffee shop. Although 'working' isn't quite the right word... Dancing until I dropped in the kitchen, salsa lessons with hot Latinos, painting clothes with acrylics during work hours, walking around the airport with plastic bags on our heads, and filming short movies—can you really call that by such a boring word as work?! ;)

The first surprise was that my manager turned out to be Ethiopian! Then it turned out that almost all my colleagues were also from Ethiopia, so we couldn't help but get interested and eventually fall in love with Ethiopian culture. We started learning Amharic (the most common language in Ethiopia), went to Ethiopian restaurants with our manager (it was funny being the only white people in the whole place!), and soon became friends with reggae musicians from Ethiopia, whose concerts we attended with enviable zeal.

By the way, Ethiopians mostly live in Virginia and Washington (even descendants of Haile Selassie settled there!), so the surprise soon faded. But every meeting with Ethiopians in other cities brought a lot of positivity. I think I was even happier to see them than my own compatriots! Especially if they started speaking Russian fluently, remembering it from their university days in Moscow during the Soviet Union. So, instead of discovering America, we discovered Africa for ourselves :)

The coffee shop where we 'settled' for the summer was a completely unserious establishment, if you can put it that way. We could eat and take food with us without limits. Despite cameras all over the cafe and regular checks, we managed to successfully slack off from work, engaging in 'self-development.' We constantly brought and listened to a lot of music, danced, and played on improvised drums made from buckets. I even started showing movies in the cafe hall, but after 'Good Bye, Lenin!' they forbade me from doing it ;)

Once I decided to paint with acrylics on my pen-stained capris. The manager came over and asked: 'I was admiring you on camera. What are you doing here?' - 'Painting.' - 'And why aren't you working?' - 'I'll finish painting and then I'll go...'. As a rule, even that got away with it.

The most fascinating activity for me was interacting with customers. Since we worked at an international airport, it was quite common to meet people from completely different corners of our vast planet. Regular customers were airport workers, among whom were failed doctors, screenwriters, and actors. I quickly assembled a whole 'film crew' for myself and even wrote a script for a comic detective story with elements of a western :) It's a pity we didn't have time to film it.

Despite all the fun, the routine automatic work soon became quite tiresome, so the desire to set off 'into free sailing' grew with every passing day...