What Does Your Airport Say About You?
Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Paris
As many of my fellow Americans curse their way through TSA lines and spend hours staring at brake lights this Thanksgiving weekend, I figured it would be fitting to begin my tales of foreign travels with the “travel” part.
Airports, contrary to popular belief, are more than mere epicenters of misery. They are mirrors reflecting the loftiest aspirations and most parochial realities of the people and places they serve.
So, put aside your own transportation woes for a few minutes and join me on my illuminating—and sometimes physically painful—journeys through the airports of Amsterdam, Edinburgh, and Paris.
Amsterdam. I’ll start with the burning concern that I left you with back on November 9 and that I’m sure has left you sleepless ever since: did I make my ridiculously tight connecting flight from Amsterdam to Edinburgh?
YES! I did! Yay me, for sprinting literally one mile through Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport with a large wheelie in tow and incurring shin splints in the process.
More to the point regarding my ability to make my connecting flight: yay, The Netherlands, for constructing a really large airport that doesn’t hinder a traveler’s forward motion with annoyances like redundant passport control and security measures.
What’s with the “Schiphol” in “Schiphol Airport?”
According to Why the Dutch are Different, Ben Coates’ slightly snarky but worthwhile introduction to Dutch history and culture: “In the 1860s, steam pumps helped drain a huge lake south of Amsterdam, including a certain part known, on account of its many shipwrecks, as the “ship-hole.’ The name survived at the airport built on the new polder—Schiphol—where planes could land and take off from an area that used to be several metres under water.”
In case you were wondering, a polder is “a tract of low land (as in the Netherlands) reclaimed from a body of water (such as the sea).” Thank you, Merriam-Webster.
My ability to cover the distance between two of the most distant points in Schiphol Airport—I kid you not, look up Arrivals Gate 28D and Departures Gate H5 on a map—was thanks both to my excellent airport run time and to commonsense/lax (depending on your viewpoint) entry and exit procedures. Since I was securitied literally from head to toe in the US before boarding my flight for Amersterdam, the Dutch didn’t feel the need to re-security me once I’d exited the plane. It’s not like I’d been able to acquire a hoverboard or criminal record en route.
“Go forth into our universe,” Schiphol Airport seems to say, “join the flow of humanity into Amsterdam, where we encourage you to spend your euros and pounds, your yen and your yuan, your rand and your rupees, in our lovely and expensive city!”
For Amsterdam is as pretty as it looks in pictures, and it could’ve been ruinously expensive had I not already spent enough dollars and cents in Italy and Edinburgh.
Speaking of which. . .
Edinburgh. easyJet may be the bane of many European travelers’ existence; however, I had a perfectly on-time and uneventful flight across the North Sea from Amsterdam to Edinburgh.
Plus, I appreciate that everyone boards the aircraft at the same time—none of this bullshit welcoming of Platinum Status, then Gold-Plated Status, then teachers and firefighters, then Silver Status, then those whose last name begins with “R,” then Bronze, then Tin, then people who can stand on one foot and twirl around while placing a hand on their head. . .you get my drift.
To board an easyJet flight, everyone walks briskly from the gate to the aircraft without respecting the personal space of others, boards from either the front or back, stows luggage, and voila! before you know it, you’re at your destination.
At least in this instance.
The culturally insightful part of my Edinburgh transportation experience occurred as I was heading out of town after an absolutely brilliant (I’m mixing my Irish and Scottish here, for which I apologize) five days spent in the company of my niece and her boyfriend, with guest appearances from my daughter, her friend, and her friend’s parents, a.k.a. buddies of mine from back home whose last day in Edinburgh coincided with my first few jet-lagged hours on Scottish soil.
The same someone (“me”) who’d scheduled that tight connection between Amsterdam and Edinburgh also thought it was a ducky idea to take a 6:00 am flight from Edinburgh to Florence via Paris. As a result, I found myself experiencing The Wild World of Edinburgh International Airport at 4:45 AM.
First, there was the bearded bloke attired in combat boots and a Sleeping Beauty dress, striding grimly across the airport as if to do battle. With a Converse high-topped, man-bunned Cinderella, perhaps?
A middle-aged woman wearing a silver tracksuit and sparkly tiara scanned the departure gate area eagerly, looking for, I don’t know what, perhaps an athleisure fashion contest that she’d already crowned herself winner of?
And what would Scotland be without kilts? At least a dozen kilted men representing different clans stood at my departure gate. Was Paris playing unlikely host to a Highland Games?
What sorts of “games” do kilted folk play at Highland Games?
While Highland Games offer ample opportunities for arm and wrist workouts to participants tossing back shots of whisky, more physically demanding games include tug o’ war, hammer throw, shot put, and caber toss.
There’s a lot more to caber tossing than you might expect. In the words of Cottages & Castles, a site I recommend for armchair travelling Scotland, “competitors toss a 20-foot-long caber (a large log), which normally weighs around 150 lbs., as far as possible. The caber toss is also a good test of stability as the athlete has to balance the caber in their hands and perform a run-up before they toss it. Athletes’ throws are also judged on their straightness; a perfect toss sees the small end of the caber facing away from the thrower, at a '12 o’clock' angle.”
One of the younger kilted men stood behind me in the boarding line talking to his girlfriend as if mumbling through marbles. I was able to interpret three of his utterances:
“I lost my fucking shoes in Cyprus.”
“I hadda fucking play football.”
“Wish I could get a fucking pint right now.”
Paris. My travels this month took me to the UK, Italy, and The Netherlands, yet, to look at my passport, you’d think the only country I visited was France.
Allow me to explain. Two of the three countries where I actually left the airport—the UK and Italy—have scanning machines that leave no mark on one’s passport. And the Dutch have no passport controls, at least none that I encountered.
My AirFrance flight from Edinburgh to Florence required a plane change at Charles de Gaulle airport. A few minutes before landing, a flight attendant informed me and the woman behind me that we would need to “hurry” to make our connection to Florence.
Well, there’s no “hurrying” through Paris CDG. We landed, we were put on a bus, we were driven past the terminal where we needed to catch our connecting flight, and then we were deposited far, far away. The other Florence-bound woman and I burst out of the bus yanking our wheelies behind us—thankfully, neither of us had checked luggage—and started sprinting through the airport.
I was feeling some Schiphol déjà vu—that is, until our mad dash was halted not once, not twice, but thrice for passport checks.
At the third, a stony-faced human stamped our passports.
Yippee, now I can prove that I spent a very annoying hour of my life at Paris CDG!
The icing on the cake was having to pass through security again. Mind you, we’d been successfully secured in Edinburgh and, in the interim, had encountered exactly zero opportunities to procure hoverboards or criminal records.
Italy. HA! The Italian Train Story will get its own article.
All I’ll say now is that trying to understand the rhyme or reason behind Italy’s many train rules and processes is futile because there is no rhyme. There is no reason. There is only bureaucracy, bureaucracy on such a vast and soul-scorching scale that it leaves Dante’s inner circle of hell in the dust—I mean, in the ashes.
Until next time, arrivederci, and may your remaining holiday travels proceed as smoothly as my November 10, 2023 easyJet flight from AMS to EDI.