This bench where I sat at Tromso airport reminded me of a night I spent on this bench the year before that time.

In the morning of that night, I was going to Helsinki by plane departing from Tromso with a connection in Riga. Since the plane was leaving very early, I decided to stay at the airport instead of spending the night at a hotel.

When I entered the airport, I saw that almost all the benches were full, and there were even people lying on the ground. I realized I wasn't the only one making plans to spend the night at the airport. I found an empty bench and sat down. I was thinking of lying on it, when I felt sleepy. After a while a girl left her suitcase and bag in front of the bench where I was, then asked me to look at her belongings and went outside the airport to smoke a cigarette.


When she finished her cigarette, she came back, thanked me and sat next to me on the bench where I planned to lie down. Since there was no other flight that night, she was going to wait for the morning like me and many other people on other benches and ground, and I was not going to be able to lie down there...

After a while we started chatting. Her name was Kamile, a blonde, blue-eyed classic Lithuanian. She was in her early 20s, adventurous and traveling alone like me. She had come to Tromso from Svalbard Island and was going to return to her country. We were going to Riga on the same plane...

I found it interesting that she went to Svalbard Island and asked her to tell about it. While telling the story, she showed me the photographs she took and made me want to go to Svalbard Island the next year... Interestingly, the conversation suddenly turned to ghosts from Svalbard Island. She said there were a lot of ghosts in the north of the world, and her grandmother could sense them, etc. I told that those ghosts could be other creatures with "3 letters"... :)

We chatted for hours about many topics.

While we were chatting, it was late at night and instead of trying to resist sleep, we decided to sleep for a few hours, but the bench was not big enough for the two of us, so we put our heads in the middle of the bench and slept lying on opposite sides, with our feet outside the right and left sides of the bench.

In the morning, she woke me up saying that I would be late for check-in. I realized that she had already checked-in. Out of curiosity, I asked her why she didn't wake me up before, and when she replied with a smile, "You were sleeping so well, I didn't want to wake you up," I felt like I was in a scene from Turkish Yesilcam movies.

Then I got up and checked in, and we continued chatting until we got inside and boarded the plane. It was time to leave, we added each other on Facebook, as we do with many of my friends from many parts of the world, whom I had met during my travels and became close with, and then we got on the plane.

I saw her for the last time by chance in Riga while she was waiting for the bus to go to Lithuania, and we said goodbye from afar. She was now one of my friends that I would never see again, like the others I met on my travels.

Then, I set out towards the city to visit Riga until it was time for my flight to Helsinki to depart.

A year later, when I was at Tromso airport again, even though the bench I was sitting on was just a bench, I felt like I saw someone I knew and I wanted to take a photo of it as a keepsake.