IBIZA - The High Life

Full-time bon vivant Bhaichand Patel recalls his jetsetting days as a UN diplomat

- Bhaichand Patel

UN employees were entitled to six weeks of leave annually, plus return airfare for the whole family to the home country every two years. When you include travel on official business you end up seeing a lot of the world. I have been to exotic places like Tahiti and Samoa in the Pacific and Malawi and Ethiopia in Africa. I must have circled the globe at least a dozen times, travelling west from New york to Fiji and, still going west to India with a stop in Europe.

In the quiet university town of Cluj in Romania my hosts thoughtfully left a bottle of palinca, a local plum brandy, in my hotel room. It was basically a poor man’s drink but I liked its hearty taste. When I needed another bottle, I went down to the local store. To my astonishment, the lady behind the counter grabbed hold of a grubby plastic bottle that previously held mineral water and filled it up from a ten-gallon cylinder. I was charged the equivalent of less than two hundred rupees. Tasty and heady but the moonshine could have rotted my guts.