Lessons Learned from Airports

Hotdogs, normally a food that costs very little in the hotdog vendor stands of the world, are abnormally high priced in airports. Fruit is rare. Bars never print the cost of their overpriced draft beers on the menu. Starbucks is always busy.

The majority of American businessmen traveling appear to be in the IT biz, love those bluetooth gizmos that make them look like the Borg, and wear unflattering pleated pants and dumpy shoes. Some could be attractive but their uniform of American Male geekdom destroys any sex appeal at all. Business suits and polished shoes, and a nice haircut can still make a man devastatingly attractive even if he isn't classically handsome. The tv show "Mad Men"is a perfect example of that.

You can really tell alot about a region by the quality of the bookstores in their airport. American airports usually have crap bookstores: Charlotte Airport has tons of political books mostly slamming Barack Obama or Democrats or Liberals, books on how we are winning the war in Iraq, business management guides for dummies. The Columbia airport has lots of Christian and inspirational reading alongside the rightwing tripe, the Detroit airport has a pretty good bookstore with decent fiction and a travel section, the Chicago Airport has almost no books for sale at all. I couldn't find any books and only fashion magazines for sale in Miami. National Airport in Washington DC has a great local independent bookstore and even the newsstands have tons of political books from the left and the right. In contrast, the Amsterdam airport has a large bookshop with books in Dutch and English - heavily focused on sex. Even little London City Airport has a good bookstore with tons of fiction and non fiction.

Southern security guards are more polite than those of the Northern states. No two airports in the US have the same policy about shoes or your boarding pass.

I still get a warm fuzzy feeling when the border officials say "Welcome Home" when I go through immigration.