"You have such a beautiful smile. You certainly come from an exotic country." A hundred-year-old gentleman, one and a half meters tall, flashed his artificial prosthesis at me. That was right at the moment when I was thanking the lovely grandmothers for showing me the direction to the post office. The old man pulled me up and (to my surprise) held my hand firmly. "Where are you from, my dear?" "From Slovakia..." I said slightly startled, slightly amused. "From Slovakia? I would recommend you at least a Spanish girl." I pretended to be flattered, even though it wasn't the first time I'd heard that. Although I spent a lot of time in Spain and thanks to the Spanish bilingual grammar school I spoke Spanish fluently, but I didn't really feel like a Spaniard... And that's where the tricky question came in:

"Madam. Would you ever go on a date with me?"

Wow! No one has ever asked me that directly. Do men need a hundred years to develop enough courage? Or did the gentleman say that he really had nothing to lose and revealed the true face of audacity? But what is the answer to such a question?, flashed through my head. Perhaps he blamed something unidentifiable from my facial expression, because he continued: "You know, I was a pilot during the war, I know Slovakia well, we flew over it." In my head, I started to calculate in which war he might still have flown, whether it was in the First or the Second World War... Sometimes these words certainly took a toll on the ladies, even when he added that his late wife was also Slovak. I finally came to my senses after finishing the fractions, division and truncation in my mind and stammered out:

"Excuse me, but I have a boyfriend." How to decently fight off the century-old grandfather from the Pixar fairy tale? "Oh, it turns everything into things!" Called out. "I would never try to take over a bachelor's girlfriend. But tell me, please, if you didn't have a boyfriend, would you go on that date with me?” "Yes, of course," I smiled as warmly as I could.

There was a twinkle in Mr.'s eye,

he kissed my hand and said goodbye:

"I hope to see you again sometime."