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January 20th, 2009

ritaxis: (Default)
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 12:39 pm
It's all true.

It's bigger than the extended solar system: it has space warps scattered irregularly throughout its vast and echoing halls: to get from one terminal to the next to connect to your next flight, you must march along many long corridors, making severak switchbacks, before you can ride a bus for about a mile through winding lanes lined by hulking brick buildings and decorated with the hulks of buses of ancient eras, and then you must enter into a giant's foyer which is not the terminal, but only the vestibule to yet another series of long treks through branching and reconverging corridors and opening halls. You will be forced to go in circles, real circles, and you will go up a dizzying tall escalator, and round in a circle past a sign that declares you are in a terminal you do not want to be in -- but the very helpful and pleasant staff will assure you that you are going in the right direction after all, so you will persevere -- and down another escalator facing exactly back in the direction you came so long ago, but do not despair; you will only go halfway down again before you are taken in another 180 degree turn and sent down still more corridors -- about now you will begin to doubt that you read the sign correctly that said your airline was in the terminal you are headed to, but the signs have stopped reappearing and you still haven't seen a television screen, so you break down and ask again, but this time you are led to the zone of television screens, on which your flight is listed but in place of the gate number it says "please wait."

You have two hours before they will tell you where your plane leaves from.

I don't know about you, but I am in good humor about this, because I have a carry-on bag full of fresh vegetables and nobody seems to question this.

The internet-for-hire machine is slow and dumb, but it's here, which is cool. The sign on process timed out while I was reading the disclosure about how they block a lot of sites, but what do you expect in an age when AT&T treats me like a criminal when I try to activate international calling (story is tiresome and I'm running out of time).