Thursday, September 3, 2015

Travelling Hopefully - An Impromptu Weather Report

It's pissing down with rain.  Either that or the airport has sprung a leak.  Whole streams of water are sluicing down the outside of the building causing at least one person cooped up inside to wish he could step out onto a balcony.  Thunder is making so much noise that its almost overshadowing the noise of the bathroom cleaners who are apparently using controlled explosions to make their job easier or at least final.

There really isn't any point to this blog entry except for the fact that in my aimless wanderings around Bangkok Airport I have once again passed a free internet station.  Also, as I may have mentioned, its raining, heavily.

I know that Thailand is tropical and therefore gets a very generous water from the sky allocation but I'm feeling slightly disoriented.  Teeming rain and crashing thunder always puts me in mind of central European locations with mountains, ruined castles and Peter Cushing.  When I encounter weather like this I always look around to see if some maniac is stitching bits of corpse together in a basement somewhere.

Airports must be some of the most depressing locations on the planet.  They are staffed by literally thousands of people who spend their days attending to the needs of people who can afford air travel.  The passengers themselves are either on the way to holidays or on the way home.  In either case their affection for a poorly lit above ground bunker is likely to be low.  Nobody buys postcards of airports.  Although if there was a stall I might.

It is fair to say that airports are occupied by people who are desperate to get out of them to somewhere nicer and those suffering souls for whom working at an airport is the closest they are likely to get to international travel themselves.  Resentment, impatience and sheer frustration are as much a part of the construction as reinforced concrete.

Strangely I don't feel resentful, impatient or frustrated in airports but the absence of these negative emotions produces absolutely nothing positive to replace them.  It is always dusk at an airport, large numbers of people you don't know and don't care about (at least I don't, possibly I'm an unworthy person) mill about, meander to and fro and stand right in front of the indicator boards when you're trying to find your flight.  Meanwhile hordes of smartly uniformed people with bright smiles and eyes begging for death do their best to do as little for you as possible.  If bland was a weapon then airports would be serial killers.

Many more blog posts like this and people will be saying the same about me.

1 comment:

  1. Just finished reading this series of entries and throughly enjoyed them! Herry

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