I love the international arrivals terminal of airports. It is one of the few times in life you can mindlessly follow the herd and it will take you on the most efficient path to get where you want to go (that is simply because it is the only path). It is also the last few minutes of un-perplexed sanity you are granted in a foreign country. You traverse glassed-in hallways and carpeted cattle-pathways that twist and turn like the streets of any trading-village-turned-city, until you are fed into some amusement park cue where you await your moment at the passport control window, praying you didn’t land in the line behind the family of 14 from Kuwait (not that borders officials ever profile).
There are two types of people who work behind these glass windows. There are the ones who make you feel warm and fuzzy about this new adventure in this foreign land. In their smile you see candle-lit dinners in cozy restaurants or strolls in springtime gardens, depending on what time of year you are traveling. The welcoming embrace of their eyes fills you with anticipation for the days ahead. They ask some pleasantry, eyes beaming, stamp your passport, smiling genuinely, and wish you a pleasant visit. You leave your first experience in this foreign land knowing you are going to have a wonderful time.
Then there are the ones who bring to mind images of prisoners wasting away in terracotta walls deep in the bowels of countries that have never heard the phrase “prisoner’s rights” or “cruel and unusual punishment”. You hold your breath as they flip through your passport, terrified they’ll see the stamp from that trip to Turkey and throw you in a cell until some distant day when they get around to interrogating you - sometime after the war with terror, or oil, or whatever it is with, is over. You realize with absolute certainty as you stand there, sweating the results of their narrow-eyed study of your passport, that you are going to spend the first day in their country lost, perplexed, scared, and dazed and the remaining days of your vacation safely hiding in the hotel room, which probably has neither heat nor air conditioning, which wouldn’t matter since there will be no doors or windows.
Interestingly which of these people you get seems to have nothing to do with the country. There are no more Commandants in Germany than there are Twinkle Eyes in Italy. It is luck of the draw. I got Twinkle Eyes today. Thank God. Given the mental state I was in, I may have just crawled into my luggage and suffocated myself if a spider stared at me, much less a passport-scoping prison guard from Auschwitz
From passport control, you are dumped into a pasture of luggage belts. If you are in the lucky thirty percent, your bags actually arrive about an hour later and you wind through rows of green “no declare” lanes, wondering when the man with the oozy is going to step out from a corner and demand to see what you really have in those bags. Why is it we feel guilty when we haven’t done anything wrong? When my office manager would ask me if I left the coffee pot on, I would declare emphatically I hadn’t, know that I hadn’t, and feel so guilty I just knew that she could tell I must have done it because I obviously felt guilty. How do you escape this trap? Every time you say “No, really, I didn’t!” you look, and feel, even guiltier.
So you walk through the green coded ‘nothing to declare line’ (probably with nothing to declare since you are arriving and haven’t bought all the things you are going to illegally carry back to your own country), certain you look guilty and are going to be seized and searched by Rottweillers and women dressed in uniform who look just like the Rottweillers, except with lipstick. You let out a sigh of relief as you spill out through the double doors into a sea of humanity. Neon signs everywhere, cafes, shops, people rushing, wheeled luggage and carts running over your toes. Now begins the fun. You do know, don’t you, that all airports have a secret observational deck above where the employees take their breaks? They drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and laugh as they watch the incoming tourists follow the information signs which the employees have intentionally and strategically placed to lead you in a circle (or at least the long way around) without seeming like they are leading you in a circle. If you’re lucky the signs are at least in English. But then how often are you lucky?
(By the way I never declare anything. My brother taught me at 25 a very important lesson - it is easier to get forgiveness than permission. I wish he had been around to teach me at 15 - I probably would have had a lot more fun. Not real sure this idea works with border control. Hopefully I’ll never find out.)
Philadelphia has a brilliant international arrivals trap for those with connecting flights – one of the better ones I’ve seen. You are fed through passport control, baggage claim, baggage re-check, and then enter this small area with three elevators and four escalators. There are always about two hundred people waiting for the elevators. Now being good Americans, we don’t have time to wait if there is another way to go, that doesn’t require additional energy. We might not take a set of stairs, but escalators - hey! why wait for an elevator where you will be packed in like a sardine when you can take three extra steps and ride the escalator? Because in Philadelphia, the escalator bypasses the floor that leads to the connecting terminals and, after winding a few times, dumps you right, can you guess where? The ticketing area for Terminal A. Know what that means? You have to go back through security to get to your connecting flights. Know what that means in Philadelphia which has a reputation for the longest security wait times in America? Chances are very high, you ain’t gonna make your connecting flight.
I’ll let you in on a secret. Should this ever happen to you – take the sky walkway across to the train stop, turn right and start walking, look up at the next skywalk, if you can see people, keep walking - they are in line for security at Terminal B. If you enter here, you’ll be in line at least one hour, possibly two. It doesn’t matter if your flight is leaving from Terminal B, keep walking! Look up at the next skywalk (Terminal C). Chances are there will be less people. If you can’t see anyone, enter here; otherwise keep on chugging until you get to Terminal D. Terminal D is the terminal for the miscellaneous airlines. Generally, this means there ain’t no one. You will walk straight through security, take a right and make your way back to Terminal B in less than a fifteen minute walk. You get a bit of sunshine, a smoke if you smoke, and an excuse to not feel like a fucking idiot for taking the escalator since you needed the walk anyway, right? How do I know all this? It took me three times before I figured out what the hell I was doing wrong, much to the delight, I’m sure, of the employees above. Now I do it on purpose, pull out my cigarettes and flip them off on the ride down.
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