Miscellany: Airportland

During my trip to Spain, I visited a world I like to call "Airportland." It's been portrayed in movies like "The Terminal" and "Fight Club," and for once, Hollywood isn't exaggerating or stretching reality, at least in my opinion. Sign up for any trip that involves two or more connecting flights, and that features a total flight time of over 5 hours, and you'll experience it too.

Airports, whether you're in Boston or Beijing, look and smell and sound the same. Usually built around big glass-and-steel caverns that herd travelers like scurrying ants, they tend to blend into one another in a sedate fashion. You can get a bite to eat, you can buy a shaving kit or a magazine, and you can even take a nap. However, you're confined to the terminal because, gosh darn it, you need to make that flight. Like shopping malls, airports usually make some effort to be appealing aesthetically by including works of art or striking architecture (the Madrid airport, with supports modeled after the Sagrada Familia, is shown above), but that just ends up making the whole experience more surreal.

Airlines are frighteningly uniform, too, mostly because of the economics of air travel. That same recycled-cabin-air smell, the cramped seats, the mediocre "meals" that are served - in my travels, they are remorselessly duplicated no matter where I'm going. In a way then, any overseas flight really has two destinations - wherever you're eventually headed, and that strange place called Airportland.