“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
~ Saint Augustine
So this is it. The trip has begun. We have been sitting in the Toronto airport for about six hours now, one and a half more to go. When we land in Santiago, Chile tomorrow, we will have been traveling for 24 hours. Unfortunately, 24 hours of flights and airports may be on the shorter end of what’s to come. The flight alone from Tokyo to Cape Town is 24 hours long. It’s when I remember these things that I realize how grateful I am to feel so comfortable and familiar when sitting in some contorted position on a blue airport chair-bench, amongst the drone of airport life.
And if you are planning on spending six hours in the airport, the international terminal is where you want to be. Why? Because not only do you find grown men slopping around in their jammies next to women clad in leather pants and stilettos, but you also get a chance to witness the awkwardness involved in cross-cultural encounters in public places. To make eye-contact when we bump shoulders, or not to make eye-contact? To slow down when speaking to the waitress, or not to? Everyone reacts differently. But this isn’t even the best part. By far, the best thing about the international terminal in the airport, is that when they announce each flight five times, they announce it in three different languages. And no one can ever understand the woman anyways, because the sound quality is so bad. So every two minutes everyone in the terminal pauses and looks upward (as if it might sound better if we all stare at the speakers), and starts mumbling to whoever they are next to about what they might be saying, questioning whether it is in their language or not. God forbid, when they call out a lost child or something, you might as well just put them on a plane in whatever direction they came from, because they are not ever going to find their parents when no one can decipher the difference between the sound of the child’s name and the capital of the country they are flying to. Just saying.
All that being said, my flight is about to board and I still need to brush my teeth and take out my contacts. Which is also one of my favorite things about airports–watching what people do in the bathroom. But I don’t have time to get into that right now. At least I’m not the girl using the automatic faucet in the airport as a shower. One day maybe…
