Holiday at the Airport
December 11, 2008 | Uncategorized
You know we’re getting into the holiday season when you start seeing more stories about the horrors of traveling through airports. Everyone’s talking about crowded flights, crowded skies, crowded everything. It builds up to such a crescendo in the media that you begin considering hitchhiking home for the holidays.
Although travelers in Bangkok’s airport couldn’t hitch home, their horror story did come to an end a week ago when the city’s airport was finally reopened. 300,000 passengers had been stranded there after the airport had been shut down for more than a week by a group seeking the ouster of the prime minister. “It hasn’t been fun the past few days.” AP quoted a television reporter from Germany as saying as she tried to make her way back home.
Perhaps taking all this into account, airport officials in Houston, TX are attempting to make the holiday season fun by setting up karaoke booths for travelers. For the past two years they’ve been inviting local bands and choruses to perform and they thought this would be the next logical step.
Logical, perhaps, but if the volume is up it may not be all that comforting to fellow travelers who just want to relax for a few minutes between flights. Me singing “Jingle Bell Rock” would clear the terminal faster than a bomb scare. If you’d like to see an interesting video by the Houston Chronicle showing what it was like that first day, click here.
While the folks in Houston are trying to make merry at the airport, over in Europe there’s bit of disagreement about keeping modest at the airport.
About a month or so ago the European Commission shelved plans to use a full-body airport screening device that was supposed to reveal whether a traveler was carrying a concealed explosive or ceramic knife. The problem is that some at the EU thought perhaps the scanner would be a bit too revealing.
The Germans — who dubbed the device the “naked scanner” and said the whole thing was “nonsense” — have decided to go ahead with tests to see if they can produce images that don’t show travelers naked. As of today 4,357 male European Commissioners have requested to be present at the testing of the machine.
Jim Ferri
