Airports really are amusing places when you think about it....
This is especially true for the transit traveller who is virtually trapped within the confines of time forced to spend hours inside them carefully planning how to space out the next few hours with the limited entertainment available.
And although you may think you're bored pacing up and down between duty free stores and newsagencies, try and spend a little more time people watching. Yeah you can ride the 'Love Actually' wave watching people coming and going, smiling, laughing, hugging and crying. This should keep you occupied for a while and you may even get a little choked up on the smog of emotion but it's predictability will have you pacing soon enough once more.
Try and look a little deeper. Past check-in, through security and into the bowels of the terminal. It is there you will find a curious social abnormality, one I have only just really noticed. The business traveller drinking wine with his breakfast at a cafe at 6am and at the bar two bogans have dissed the food and decided bourbon was their breakfast of choice. Only about half an hour later and on the plane a couple has ordered a beer and vodka.
And no one bats an eyelid.
What is it with aiports that makes it socially acceptable to drink alcohol at that time of the morning? Anywhere outside an aiport terminal and I would be called an alcoholic cracking a bottle of wine for breakfast. Nowhere else in the world are people clock watching more than airports so it's not like they don't know what the time is... so what is it then?
I guess it makes it hard to judge a fellow traveller when you don't know where they've been or where they're going right? Maybe the time exists in aiports but timezones certainly don't. Afterall, it is 5 o'clock somewhere in the world, right? And that person swigging that drink may have just come from there...
