· Wander aimlessly through the various stores, looking at all the useless trinkets they try to pedal on us weary travelers (ok I caved and bought an AC adapter for 8 pounds… I swear I needed it)
· Make conversions from pounds to dollars and wonder how the American dollar always ends up on the short end of the stick
· People watch. Now! There are many subcategories of this activity
o Those who are ambling at a normal pace, seemingly as bored as I am in this airport
o Those who walk 5 steps, stop, take out their boarding passes, walk backwards 10 steps to the computer screen, then continue walking as if nothing has happened
o Those who sprint through the crowd, dodging fellow travelers like a gold medal downhill ski run trying to get to their gate on time (my personal favorite)
· Check for your passport, wallet, boarding pass, and backpack at least 2324983984203 times (and secretly fearing it’s gone each and every time, thus prompting me to keep checking)
· Futilely attempt to log in to the Boing network or whatever they call their wi-fi here, which is 10 pounds per day! That’s almost $20/day US money
· Stare at the ever so aesthetically pleasing terminal 5. It’s really just a 21st century modern version of a 19th century railway station, as the terminal curves in 1 large arc over a 2 story space filled with mezzanines, large atrium areas, information kiosks, duty-free shops, and ample seating areas.
o Now that I think of it, the engineering of the enormous columns that rise from the floor and attach to the roof at 4 different points of intersections is a mind-blowing expansion of Le Corbusier’s idea for the free plan.
o He advocated using columns that were both free from the glass façade and free from interior walls so that both could be as flexible as possible
o Here at Heathrow, this concept is taken extremely far as the columns do act in this fashion but are expressed in a very Neo-modern, ultra-expressionist, Neo-High Tech fashion; a remarkable feat of engineering, in my opinion.
· Have a decent meal at an airport. Yes, I spent 6.25 pounds (which is about $11). Yet I received a chicken sandwich with bacon and tomatoes on bread which wasn’t as hard as a rock (I’m looking at the crumbling mess that comes out of your toasters, Subway), a bag of grapes, and REAL fresh squeezed lemonade (hear that Minute Maid!!??!!...I’m talking to you. Your lemonade might be in every Subway and Firehouse across the country, but guess what? It sucks!!
o On a tangent, I think we may have gone a little too far with this whole mass production thing. Why can’t we still get freshly squeezed lemonade from any major food producer. Why did I find the last 3 times I went a chick-fil-a that their lemonade, which used to surpass any on the market, was suddenly watered down and tasted like imitation lemonade?
o Yeah, ok, I get it. When the Industrial Revolution set in we were looking to find cheap ways to get the most amound of our product to the most amound of people. Well done Mr. Ford. Well done, U.S. Steel. Well done Mr. Levi Strauss. But don’t you think it’s about time we started to scale down mass production? We are becoming a country that is consuming and even demanding inferior products. Example: beer. Bud Light, Miller Light, Pabst Blue Ribbon. Shame on you. We need to produce quality as opposed to quantity. Maybe this is the reason we’ve seen an increase in the number of micro brewers over the last decade or so. Take a look at the current crop of beer commercials. They’re marketed to IDIOTS! If they’re trying to market to the Neanderthal Fraternity demographic, well done sirs. Yes I know the population increases have put a strain on our economy, food shortages have caused riots in third world countries, and the downturn in 2008 caused every company to scale down (read: make shittier products). But once our economy finally turns around, can we stop making cereal boxes thinner to save product, or stop carving out the bottom of peanut butter jars (check it out, it’s a crater!) just to save money. But in the end the dollar wins, so the consumers get stuck on the short end, as always.
· Contemplate the end of the world. As I’m writing this at 1:10pm on May 21, 2011, the world is scheduled to start coming to an end at 6pm (New Zealand time I’m hearing). Thus, this post may never make it to the interwebz, as I won’t have a chance to post it until after the destruction begins.
And finally….
· Think of different items to put on some kind of list that indicates my current level of boredom
No comments:
Post a Comment