Heathrow Airport - England, United Kingdom, Europe
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Stumble It!Recently I was stuck in Heathrow Airport; no words can describe how much I dislike it. It is an ugly poorly planned jumble of concrete buildings, thrown haphazardly in the general vicinity of London - a huge monster. Once the architect had finished, for some reason the decorators seemed to have taken one look at it and decided they'd go with what they had. The décor looks as though it is designed to depress travellers as soon as they enter; the purpose of the layout is to get you completely lost however many times you’ve been there before.
I have no idea why beige is used; the bland background is then covered in beautiful "artwork", I mean adverts, adverts for banks. Why is that? Do people arrive in the UK and immediately need to open bank accounts? JFK in New York is more a small village than an airport, but it is easy to navigate. If you do get lost, staff are friendly and helpful. Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam is a colossal airport however, I have never been in a more calm and relaxing airport. It's easy to get where you want to go and it is startlingly clean. Even though it was mobbed with people at the time I was there, Schiphol Airport didn't feel cramped.
My aversion to Heathrow got blown into epic proportions when I had to spend eight hours in the domestic departure lounge with nothing but a Costa Coffee to occupy me. That is really only interesting for the first ten minuets. But even in those dismal conditions, I had the opportunity to engage in my favourite activity, people watching. How people cope in entrapment for the fog to clear was an interesting and entertaining pastime. However dreadful Heathrow is, I have to admit the people watching was excellent!
Children most predictably seemed to be the only ones excited. The departure lounge can become a giant playground of exciting new places to explore: lots of legs to run into, seats to climb over and places to hide from their parents, frantically chasing after them. The huge floor-to-ceiling windows were great places to pretend to be aeroplanes rushing along into the sky. The kids ran back and forth with their arms outstretched, their imaginations racing.
Across from me was a young woman sitting cross-legged, her dark hair wound into dreadlocks, piled up on her head in what seemed like a feat of engineering. Her bright blue shawl that wound around her neck was a startling contrast to the rest of her black clothing. She had a set of battered headphones over her ears wired to an antiquated Walkman on her lap, the sounds from which I could faintly make out as crackling. She swayed and bobbed with her eyes closed, dancing along to the music, losing herself to the world inside her mind.
To my right sat an old man, his white hair cropped short under his battered flat-cap. He was wearing a worn woollen jumper that was fraying at the sleeves, faded old jeans and muddy worn work boots. His piercing blue eyes gazed around the room from his weather-beaten craggy face, searching the crowds. At first I wrongly assumed he was people watching to help pass the time. I noticed though, that he was people drawing. I watched as he threw random scribbled lines onto the hard white paper; from these scratched marks, the faces of people sitting around us appeared out of the chaos. The black and white representations of the world seemed to stream out of his fingers effortlessly, a quick scratch here, a smudge of ink there and finally a face.
Dotted in various locations of the airport lay the occasional prone figure, people sleeping stretched out across several hard chairs, their heads resting on jackets and hands clutching at bags. It was an odd phenomenon, a truly strange and unique occurrence only found in airports. Only in airports is it socially acceptable to sleep in a public place, the other place being the beach. This brings up another oddity of airports: the irrelevance of time. Personal body clocks can vary to an absurd degree; it can feel like the middle of the night even when blinding sunlight is shining through the windows.
Many deal with the increasing boredom of airport waiting burying their noses into whatever "top titles" are offered at the tiny W H Smiths. Green stickers are marked two for £20 from the cover of at least half the books I spotted from my seat. Others choose to occupy their time with food. I was happy to sit and watch, letting the world around me provide the entertainment.
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