Considering how much I love travelling, I don't particularly enjoy the travel-part of it. Especially by train. And boats aren't really the most natural place for me either. And nightbuses I can do without for the rest of my life. And I can think of about 200 places more comfortable than the camel's back. And though it is the fastest and most convenient method, I don't really enjoy flying either.
I am that much of socially challenged Northern ogre obsessively guarding her personal space that I doubt I'll ever be comfortable in a metal tube jam-packed with people with varying degrees of issues with their personal hygiene. People - deodorant is not the enemy! Terrorism, that last shot of the evening and Vladimir Putin are!
The maintenance of the current relationship means that in order to have a fight in person (as opposed to Messenger, Skype or text messages) one of us needs to get on that plane and wreak some havoc on the CO2-emissions.
Seeing I've done a bit of travelling and even have a couple of international moves under my Fendi belt I have spent quite a bit of time at the airports. Sleeping, shopping, breaking up, shaving legs and drowning sorrows. And between you and me, I can tell you that those tiny rooms with latex-gloved officers are not an urban legend.
Airports are strange places where everybody seems to be out of place. Everyone seems like a character in a play the script for which no-one has actually been given.
Businessmen staring at the screens of their laptops, completely oblivious whether the airport this week is in Soul or Southampton. Dads on the annual summer holiday with their families, wearing that same ivory-coloured linen suit that has been dug out specially for this holiday the way it has been every summer for the past 30 years. The proportions might have changed over the decades - both in the man and in fashion but "it's a perfectly fine suit - stop fussing over it, Ma!". And then there's that man who's had too much to drink already at the airport and who always seems to be alone. Perhaps he's the same guy the speakers are giving "absolutely final calls" for, sometimes for 4 times?
Helsinki-Vantaa airport has become a familiar place over the years. And it is a good airport. Like that drum-playing monkey you wind up with that key in its back I find myself following the same routine.
It all starts at home. I'm neurotically scared of missing my plane (been there, done that. And not just once) so Lord almighty if the flights in the morning - that means I'm too terrified to sleep the night before. In any case I get there way too early and (cursing my nerves) try to find something constructive to fill all the hours with. In the interest of sanity (both my own and the fellow passengers) I no longer even bother with Sudoku. My bad karma with number 2 always gets me in the end. No matter how "suitable for idiots (or, as the like to call it in the industry: beginners) it might be. I have begun it several times and not once have I finished.
So I entertain myself with a pile of extortionately priced foreign glossies and drool over clothes that I can't afford, that aren't available in my country and that are being modelled by women I'll never look anything like.
I've yet to share the most absurd routine though. I eat at home, just in case. You know, in case I get to the airport too late to have time to eat there. And at the airport I eat (you guessed it), just in case - just in case my special meal won't make the flight. And the ridiculous part? The meal I insist on at the airport is bacon sandwich. And that special in-flight meal of mine? Kosher.
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