African student Omar would like to return home to Angola, but he is enrolled in a three-year postgraduate research fellowship at a clinic in Prague. One day while seeing off a friend at the airport, he and a girl named Mariama are brought together by chance as he offers to accompany her in an unfamiliar city toward the International Student Club, where she plays bass in a jazz orchestra.
An upholsterer who is preparing a rocket for takeoff accidentally jettisons himself into space and returns to Earth 500 years later with an alien companion who wishes to learn more about the human race.