Being in the airport, an experience often overlooked but full of mini-dramas and worthy of observations. There is the family with loud children hanging on some imaginary center as if it were a school of fish aimlessly rotating about that center but the group is going in a very decided direction. A kid might fall and start screaming for some acknowledgment for his momentary pain. Once he's grown up he will scream quietly also for the public humiliation of being a clumsy idiot. Then there are the many tourists oblivious of their tourist attire that make them stand out, wearing T-shirts over their obese bodies, some tacky hat matched by equally banal shoes and shorts, looking so happy to start their journey that will undoubtedly be tiring because they will want to see everything and deal with the unfriendly locals that are even more tired of tourists.
Then there's the multi-language features of any international airport. You sit there and the couple next to you are having some sort of intensive discussion, and you wonder if they are fighting or if that's how their language sounds normally. Judging by the ups and downs of the tonality and the interplay between that tone, and how they are reinforced by the hand waving and changes in facial expression, you have some idea about what they are up to. Some imagination is helpful.
In the airports outside the US, there is a glaring difference in terms of smoking. As soon as you disembark from the plane, you can smell cigarette smoke. Where are they from when cigarette smoking is supposedly banned? Well, not really. One of the first signs you see when you take your first steps in a Spanish airport is that you are only allowed to smoke in certain designated areas. And where are those areas? They are little rooms, but the rooms' doors aren't ever closed. In fact, there are no doors, but a big opening. I don't quite understand the point of a smoking room that has a big exit for the smoke to permeate through the whole airport. I can imagine that the smoker's lobby says at least you don't have someone puffing right next to you. It's all a joke, really, just like when I was traveling by train in Switzerland and the same car is divided into smoking and non-smoking section separated by an open door. When it comes to cigarette smoking, there can't be a compromise on the degree of smoke.
None of what I said details the high drama you could find at the security check where ridiculous rules are in place to attempt to thwart a catastrophe of low probabilities. Or at the passport control where, especially in arrogant countries like the US and the UK, foreigners are subjected sometimes to dramatic humiliations or worse. And let's not forget about the baggage claim where the tales of a lost luggage brings out the worst of us as well as the worst of the airline industry. But wait, their worst is actually felt on the airplane before take off. More dramas are to be head when you wonder why you can't board, or worst, why you are still sitting in a plane that hasn't moved an inch from the tarmac.
But those are the high dramas that, thankfully, don't happen that often in our experience in the airport. Still, even without those stories, you often just have to sit and watch and see the world flashing in front of you, seeing all these people from all corners of the world, especially if you are in one of the major airports in the world, and you wonder how many people you are missing, how many of their stories you might find interesting. After all, they are all traveling for a reason, and however it might seem ordinary, you can stop and smell the flowers of their ordinariness and see the interesting stories that span from their walk down to or from their gates. Like that old man sitting in a wheel chair being pushed by a weary airport attendant.
