(Back from the Past) Travel Memories: 2. Waiting at Frankfurt

(From 5/5/2008)
Long trips are good to get in touch with very different people and situations. For instance, at Frankfurt, after a good walk through the new terminal, which didn't seem to be finished yet —it was very empty and it reminded me of those 70s futuristic movies, with the metallic walls and the polished floors— and after going through a couple of passport controls, I arrived to the waiting room of my flight, and suddenly, the change in the ratial distribution of people was obvious: chinese, South-East Asia people, indians, malaysians, etc. I spent a good time just looking at them. People are very similar deep down, too much maybe, but there are some traits, movements, gestures, postures, that seem to change from continent to continent. All of them mixed in an airport is something worth seeing.

Then, you have all the colourful stories. I was sitting there finishing the installation of the Slackware packages that were left to install in my laptop, looking at the 747 that was going to be my life space for the next 11 or 12 hours —it doesn't look so large, I thought, until I compared it to the trucks that were around it, and boy what a mistake; of course, I cannot say that there is that much of a difference with other planes once you sit inside— when it looked like there was a football match on TV somewhere, judging by the noise, shouts and inintelligible comments that I was hearing. But no, it came from a laptop set between two rows of seats, while a group of six or seven people were looking very attentively to it. Football?, no. When I went over to them, boxing. Or some kind of strange fight, I didn't watch that much. Most of these guys stormed the boarding gate when it was time to board. Hardened people.

And a note to the biologists in the audience. I would have never expected to see boxes containing alive fishes from the Amazonas (or so was written in Spanish outside) being loaded into the plane deck. What a trip for the little beasts!. Fortunately, it's not necessary to make holes in the boxes, but I am sure they must do something to keep them alive.