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Travelling again

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 12/07/18 18:00
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On a flying trip to Koln (Cologne) to collect my daughter from her school trip so that she can be back in time for a dance show!!

It involves getting out of bed at 3am and two diversions on the A1 before I reached Stansted airport.

On days like this, when i’m on the go for 20 odd hours, I imagine that I’ll have extraordinary amounts of time to do extraordinary amounts of things and get ‘all caught up’

Whatever that means.

It’s never the case.

It’s exhausting and sometimes I don’t know why, but today, in the midst of this day, on the banks of the Rhine, I can figure it out.

Stansted airport is just a warehouse in the middle of a field, you can see that when you look up to the roof inside the building. It’s a Cathedral to capitalism and consumerism in its purest form.

I booked the parking the night before in the short stay car park (it was £42 for 16 hours) and they never told me that I’d have to get a bus once I’d parked. In truth I’d probably have paid the £12 for the closer car park, but that’s capitalism.

I walked into the terminal which is actually pretty nice for a warehouse, except for the Ryanair bit. That looks like sheep being herded onto cattle trucks only with less customer service and the same thing at the gates when they’re ready for their planes.

Luckily I was flying Eurowings which is the German equivalent, so much better.

It’s the shops though. It’s the shops past security.

Stansted airport is not actually an airport, it’s a shopping centre and the funny thing is that we are not actually the customers, we are the product.

The owners of Stansted airport have an agreement with the people who rent the shops to provide them with the closest possible access to people with wallets full of money and it’s designed entirely for that purpose.

You know the way you have to walk through ‘World Duty Free’ before you can get anywhere, with young girls standing with strips of paper that smell of perfume at 5:30 in the morning waving them at me in case I feel guilty enough to buy a present for my wife.

This is exhausting.

I walked through a street of shops. Of food outlets trying to pretend to be healthy, clothes outlets trying to pretend to be ethical and trendy and electrical outlets trying to be, well, electrical outlets, only to finally reach the central area where there’s not enough seats for all the people to sit  - they’re seeing 25 million passengers walk through here a year.

It’s probably well designed for 5 million, but the other 20 are customers, or products or consumers ready to be exhausted and bombarded before the sun has hardly come up with the opportunity to buy to s&$te that they don’t really want.

You then get to sit in the departure lounge and listen to the multiple cancellations of flights because First Officers are sick or there’s a technical fault or they just can’t be arsed or there aren’t enough people on the flight so they scrub it , and you’re wondering whether your flight is next.

Mine went off a respectable 30 minutes late and I arrived at Koln airport which is altogether different. It’s a smaller airport, in Europe – you know the place where the toilets don’t stink of pee?! – and it’s €2.90 to get the train into the centre of the city, to walk right out on to one of the oldest Cathedrals in Europe.

It’s not the travelling that’s exhausting, it’s what surrounds the travelling.

I made up for it by falling asleep on the grass by the River Rhine at 2pm in the afternoon!

 

Blog Post Number: 1701

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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