Short Story – Captain X’s World Tour
Photo credit: mensatic from morguefile.com
Captain X is my neighbor and he is serving in the Navy. He is a very nice person to talk with. He is like an elder brother to me and is always ready to share his military experiences which seem very interesting and funny at times, to me. On hearing many such stories, in fact I feel so lucky to be sitting out there in my home very comfortably because someone is sacrificing his sleep somewhere in the battle field, so the rest of the nation may have a nice sleep.
I could not meet Captain X before he left for an off shore tour and they had planned to visit many shores across the world. Since that tour was scheduled for four weeks, I missed him so much for a long period and was waiting for him to come back. I was excited too as he would be having a lot of new things to share with, after the tour.
As and when I came to know that he was back, I went to meet him. They were all busy, checking those items they brought from various countries and arranging and packing them. Each and every officer looked as if they were coming out of a supermarket as they were struggling with the large chunk of items with them.
I saw officers bringing costly electronics gadgets, beautiful sports shoes, toys and what not?
When I saw Captain X coming out, I was amazed as he was empty handed.
“Why did not you bring anything?” I asked.
He smiled as usual and told me that all were busy in purchasing gifts whenever they got free time but he never went out to buy anything.
Then, before he continued, his orderly brought one big box. He opened the box and told me to look inside that box.
It was full of empty bottles of various shapes. Some blue in color and some in black and there were plain ones also. I could roughly estimate the number of empty bottles to be around 30.
Then he told me that whenever he had time, he had gone out and found out the local liquor shops of that country. In each and every country the ship anchored, he could manage to get the local liquor and taste it. He made it a point to finish the local liquor of a particular country within that country itself.
He proudly presented those bottles to me and told that it was his way of familiarizing and interacting with different cultures of different countries.
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