Heathrow Airport can . . .

So it's been some time since the last post.  Such is the way when you're trying to get a degree or whatever.  At any rate, it's in-between time in the land of academia, and I'm on the road again to Nairobi.  Sadly not with bikes, but with any luck the blogging will be OK even with the pedestrian lifestyle (pun intended). 

Since I'm flying solo on this trip, I'm going to try to be a little freer with the posting than usual to keep the world up to date (you'd be amazed how long it takes to write a good blog post).  In that spirit.  Let me talk about Heathrow Airport...

To start, I really do enjoy travelling.  It's exciting: new places, fun jobs, crazy food, war-torn countries with effectively no rule of law -- these are all things that make me a little warm in the nether, but not all travel is fun and games. 

There's something about London-Heathrow that makes me feel like a sheep being herded to the shear.  The similarities are striking,really.  First, it's gonna be a mile of walking. Period.  In the same terminal?  Mile of walking.  Staying on the same plane?  Mile of walking.  Wanna change terminals?  Two buses, a boat, a train, mile of walking. 

The walking wouldn't be so bad however if you didn't feel you were in a corral the whole time:  Queue, narrow hallway, guy barking at you, bigger queue.  Have you ever seen the PETA videos where the animals are in the narrow corral and moving slow like congealing bacon grease, but every once in a while one freaks out and tries to jump over all the rest to get ahead?  Yeah, the people do that here. 

Who wouldn't be a little spooked while being herded through a maze of camera-studded hallways punctuated by a boarding pass checks so ubiquitous you can see one from the next?  Not to mention the angry GB-TSA (Yes, I made that up) types yelling at people to dump their liquids AFTER they just got off their planes.  (what, is someone gonna make a bio-bomb by peeing in a cup between planes?)

Unsurprisingly, nobody wants to talk to anybody or at least not to a scrubby American hack like myself, and you can't even get a drink of water in the airport without paying almost 2 pounds (that's like a million dollars) to buy it in a bottle.  Are water fountains illegal here?  I HATE buying bottled water waste of money and energy.

To sum up: Like a sheep to the shear you'll leave Heathrow dehydrated, a little humiliated, and never with your shirt.  Nairobi, here I come...

P. S. In Nairobi now, giggity.