Community: Real Life

Airport agony


Francesca

Francesca, 23, lives in Brussels, Belgium. She loves food and wine, travelling, and wearing her sunglasses on her head.

Francesca recently got stuck at the airport for 12 hours and is still recovering from the experience.

Everyone loves to go on holiday, don't they? I enjoy nothing more than a trip to the beach with friends or a romantic city break with a boyfriend. But although we all love the taste of that first cocktail on a balcony whilst gazing at the sunset, many of us dread the actual journey. And there's a reason for that: airports.

Modern airports come in two varieties. Large international airports are soulless non-spaces where you're forced to spend large amounts of money on complete and utter crap. In contrast, small cheapo airports offer a concentrated dose of unpleasantness miles and miles away from anything.

Large airports are meant to be closer to city centres, giving you the illusion that they're 'easy and convenient' to get to. The thing is, while our government taxes us up to the eyeballs; ask them to build a cheap, reliable way of getting from City Centre A to Airport B they start mumbling something about 'infrastructure development' looking very shifty. Have you ever been on the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow? A one-legged stilt walker with a hangover could piggyback you there faster. Dublin? There's a shopper-hopper bus that gets stuck on the one, single road which joins city to airport. Paris? It's marginally better because of the RER fast metro system.

Once you've got there you'd think airlines would be keen to show off. After all, it's easy to look good in comparison to the Stansted Express, right? But no, now they begin their cruel torture, making you queue until a bored-looking minion wearing about three tons of slap (and that's just the men) weighs your baggage and gives you the fakest smile. Then it's time for stupid questions. "Did you pack your bag yourself?" How many international terrorists and drug traffickers have they caught with this question? I'd love to know because I'm expecting the answer is pretty much a big fat zero. After you've responded with an earth-shatteringly obvious "yes" you're allowed to shuffle further into the soul-destroying maze of modern air travel.

Once you're through the gate, it's time for the worst: airport shopping. The 'boutiques' only sell perfume (the offers are never as good as they're meant to be), overpriced sunglasses which Victoria Beckham would dismiss as "too tacky", and weird silk scarves which only a colour blind person would buy. You can also buy books (but never the ones you actually want), booze (but only stuff like Midori which will sit in the cupboard under the sink for twenty years) and fags (I don't smoke). It's crap. Who designs these shopping malls? And how do they sleep at night?

Sooner or later (normally later) they call your flight and you go to security. This consists of standing in more queues (at this point I always get stuck behind a sweat-drenched podgemeister whose been exuding BO since his first plane took off 18 hours ago) before you walk through a metal detector so over-sensitive that a glint in your eye will set it off. Then you get patted down by some power-tripping jobsworth in a uniform. These people also love to confiscate things like hair products, even though 'texturising mousse' is obviously not a liquid, and any other liquids you may have in your hand luggage, which I suspect gets confiscated straight to the Friday after-work drinking session.

After this you can get on your plane and actually start going somewhere. Whoopee.

My ex once said: "Airports are machines for moving people". He was right. But the thing is they're a useless, poorly designed machine, roughly the equivalent of a teasmade your mad aunty would buy from a catalogue that fell out of the Radio Times. Whether you're at a large international hub or a bargain basement shed, by the time you actually get on the plane, you feel poked, prodded, confused, dehydrated, and thoroughly ripped off. You need a holiday just to recover from going through the airport. The worst thing is you know you have to do it all over again on the way back! Bon Voyage!

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