On Airports

In honor of my forthcoming flight back to the homeland, I'd like to share some musings I had in Gatwick airport while struggling to stay awake long enough to catch my egregiously early flight back to Copenhagen.

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Douglas Adams told us years ago that "it's no coincidence that no culture has coined the phrase 'pretty as an airport'". I'm not sure I agree. For one thing, architecturally speaking, many airports these days are making great strides. They all have their individual atmospheres. The Copenhagen airport is clean-cut, simple, elegant and not entirely unfriendly, much like the people of the city. The airport in Vilnius is clearly the product of a small and somewhat old fashioned culture.
But whatever your personal feelings on the physical attractiveness of airports is, there is no denying that they're interesting places. Airports hold a wide variety of human emotions: excitement, trepidation, sadness, irritation, boredom, happiness, panic. The range is as wide as the human capacity to feel. It's always interesting to be a player in this scaled down rendition of the human drama.
I usually find my feelings when in airports to be firmly on the positive end of the spectrum. Unless there are slow walkers in front of me; then I seethe. But it's invigorating to know you're about to step into a tube and be fired off to a place completely different from where you began, in culture, geography, and history. It's like a drive-thru banking delivery syste, but for people. And on the other end of your journey there could be almost anything waiting for you: family, old friends, people you've never met who are about to become your best friends, if only for the night, ridiculous adventures or uneventful excursions. The best part is the uncertainty inherent in traveling. Airports hold the promise of new experiences, and for that reason, I think they're quite beautiful indeed. For once, as far as I'm concerned, Douglas Adams was wrong.