Day 12: Airports.

Every time I try to check in at an american airport everything works completely different than the last time. Today it almost seemed like things would start to make sense but then the nice lady at the counter informed me that "in order to leave the United states you must have a valid ticket back to the United states". I tried to explain that, as you can see from my passport, I am not an US citizen and already booked my flight back to Europe but no chance, I had to buy a ticket back to the States. Now. Or I wouldn´t be allowed to board my flight to Curaçao.

Obviously I wasn´t very happy about this and I didn´t want to pay more than I had to. So instead of booking a ticket at an American Airways counter I set up a little office in a corner, purchased 24h internet and looked for the cheapest random flight back to America between the 28th and 30th of October. I ended up buying a ticket to Baltimore on the 29th. So I will spend halloween there. I know nothing about this city but it´s near New York, I eventually have a place to sleep and Nina Simone wrote a song about it. Maybe not the most encouraging one but if someone takes the time to dedicate a song to a whole city there must be something interesting about it.

And if someone dedicates a page of his book to airports not being pretty he must have a valid reason. After visiting many airports during the last two weeks I finally fully understand this paragraph from "The long dark Tea-time of the soul" by Douglas Adams:

 It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk Airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

Anyway: I am pretty exited about Curacao :)