Oasis

The sky is always blue, and the air warm but never too hot.  A gentle breeze blows from the desert in the evening.  Days are long and filled with pleasant things.  Nutritious, well prepared meals are served at regular hours, and refreshing drinks are available throughout the day and evening.   The library is stocked with classics in your native language. Works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere,  Twain, Dumas, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hasek are all there.  There is no television and no Internet, the mobile phone coverage does not reach here, neither do newspapers with their gossip, news of tragedies and disasters, petty political disputes, and their relentless self-congratulatory campaigns for ill defined social justice and goodness,  but the radio plays classical music uninterrupted by commercial announcements 24 hours a day.  A second radio channel plays acoustic folk music of various cultures, while all the remaining radio frequencies transmit nothing but static or silence.

No one among us is complaining.  The staff, who also live here, are young, multilingual, enthusiastic and always ready to fulfill our wishes. A  doctor and his two nurses are on duty should you need care or medications.  I spend many of my afternoons exercising in the well equipped modern  gym, and lap swimming in the Olympic size swimming pool.  During evenings, I read and scribble notes to myself.  Or play a game of chess or Go with some of the others.

From the rooftop of our fine hotel, where we play badminton or relax in Swedish made lounge chairs, and from the nearby hill where we take our after dinner walks in the shade of palm and eucalyptus trees, you can see through the desert mist the distant airport landing strip and an outline of the Boeing 777 jet that brought all of  us 239 here landing gently  in the desert after disappearing from radar over the ocean.  It is undergoing repairs, and when they are finished, in a week, month or perhaps a year or two, no one knows when, and no one seems anxious about it or in much of a hurry, it'll fly us back to where we came from. In the meantime, and I think I can speak for all of us here, we are happy at last.