Waking Up In a Stranger’s Flat

I open my eyes. All around me, everything is unfamiliar: unfamiliar wallpaper, unfamiliar white leather sofa, unfamiliar country. I moved here to teach, and here I am learning that I’m underprepared, underqualified, underdressed, and hungover. He wouldn’t let me leave last night, you see. As the party was dying, I coloured his bathroom with oversweet Georgian wine and washed down chicken wings that came back up. He decided: I could miss the last metro, sleep on this atrocious sofa, recover. Of course, now it’s 7am, and I have to teach a class of engineers, bridge builders, about ing phrasal verbs in less than two hours. And I have to do it with a hangover and a smile. I think to myself as I struggle with front door locks and keys before climbing out of a downstairs window, what a strange story this will be. And yet waking up here, it could be a whole lot worse than this beautiful Baku sunrise.