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The Return
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So I finally made it Stateside.
I left home wednesday evening at 8pm, and arrived in SC, PA at 10pm Saturday evening. (both US eastern time)
In this time I have experienced the following slightly noteworthy things.
1)
A middle-aged man of middle-eastern appearance trying to get a gas-driven chainsaw through copenhagen airport security as carry-on luggage. He himself got onboard, but was forced to leave the tool behind. He made the security personnel quite nervous, and by the time the ordeal was over, 5-6 additional security personnel staff had showed up to witness the debacle.
2) Spending 24.5 hours at Heathrow Airport's, terminal one.
I really enjoyed witnessing the ebbs and flows of people and activity at an airport. It has a slow, steady pulse as if the airport itself is alive. Life is indeed glorious.
But being unable to be enamored by this observation for the full 24 hours, I picked up a copy of Cevantes' "Don Quixote". I got through the first 250 pages at Heathrow. A shame that I had to wait to my 28th year to begin reading this work. It is a most pleasurable and amusing experience.
3) getting held back 2.5 hours as the passport control centre at Newark Airport. The travel documents issued to me by my university in 2002 had expired during this past year I spent in Denmark. My university was aware of this and had issued new ones to me. The 2.5 hours were spent mostly standing in line at the "detention facility" as they had more than a dozen staff members manning the ordinary passport control facility and only two manning the detention centre facility. The result was a bottleneck which cost many passengers their connecting flights. Luckily I had no such need of haste and was able to get the red tape cleared up in good order. I found the staff courtious and professional, if slighty lacking in the english department (but seemed to have no trouble with Spanish, a language in which I communicate exceedingly poorly).
4) On the shuttle bus from the airport to the NY port Authority I spent my time chatting with a finnish man who had been living in New York for seven years, and was returning after having visited finnish relatives. He was a Photographer and we discussed the merits of viewing displays og human frailty (through the medium of deceased specimens) as an artform. We had a great time engaging in this issue, to the point where we got wierd looks from other passengers within earshot.
5) Spending almost 3 hours waiting in line at the greyhound gate for my bus ride to milesburg. The greyhound baggage security system was amatourish, painfully slow and from what I could tell, wholly ineffective. It consisted of one security staff briefly peering into (but never touching or searcing) the opened carry-on bags for each passanger. Another staff member asked each passenger in turn to empty out their pockets and then proceeded to casually wave a hand-held metal detector about the passenger. A suicide bomber could easily just have gotten in line and blom him or herself up before being subjected to this mock security search and could kill dozens more than if he or she waited until getting on the bus. The whole exercise was a futile waste of time and ressources, in my opinion. But I guess the placebo "feel good" effect offered to the passengers has a modicum of merit in it's own right.
6) I arrived at my destination and was picked up by one of my friends that promptly invited me to a Eurotrash Party with free wine and beer. I was appalled at the lack of good cheese, crackers and fruit. But I decided to rein in my outrage and instead settled with drinking a bottle of South African Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc anno 1996, and watching lithe white females trying to dance like black people.
I guess I could have had a worse trip.
Cheers
-m
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