So, I think we need to introduce predators into airports

The Traveler: 

London Heathrow. I love England. I get around good, the cab drivers are the best in the world. The people are generally pretty cool – EXCEPT – They have this bizarre habit of simply stopping where they are, forming a little social circle, and having a chat / smoke / drink / or whatever the fuck right in the middle of an otherwise active walkway.

You’ll be walking along, and all of a sudden, like in some video game, one of these pods of people will suddenly stop and become an obstacle you have to navigate around. And for all the presumed politeness of the British, there seems to be a distinct aura of don’t give a fuck, that they’ve just disrupted the flow of foot traffic.

Nowhere is this worse than in Airports. Airports are for the most part poorly designed, anyway. I mean if you put the information sign 5 feet in front of an entrance door, you have to expect that people will stop and look at it. It’s as if someone internationally designed –as a security measure— little attention grabbing do-dads to utterly fuck up anyone’s ability to move about the premises freely.

So here’s the plan. We introduce predators into airports. Maybe if navigating the airport had an element of danger to it, folks might be more mindful of staying on the move, walking with purpose, knowing where they want to go before they step off.

Of course we can sprinkle in safe zones, so that folks can hop from one to another… do their duty free shopping in safety and then back out into the breech. I’m thinking something akin to a daily commute in Sarajevo back with it was front lines in the Yugoslav civil war. Run-Dodge-Break-For-Cover.

Now, I know what the humanists are saying… but it doesn’t have to be dangerous predators… just a bunch of really pissed off cats with maybe a few Jack Russell Terriers thrown in for variety –just something to get folks to step-off with purpose.

P.S. as an added measure, how about we also get rid of the Arrivals Displays inside of the secure area… it’s been 10 years since folks have been able to get through security to meet people at the gate –so their really just something else for stupid people to stop and look at.

So, an Indian waiter learns the value of a decimal point

The Traveler: 

London. Real quick, just now me and a friend were finishing dinner. I flag the waiter over to pay my tab. In London, like much of Europe, they use these portable credit card machines, but in London, like in most places in Europe, Tipping is exceptional not standard, so there is no line on the receipt to add a tip after it’s printed. I tell the waiter, “Add six pounds tip for your self”.

“You do it.” He said. I didn’t really understand, but once he ran my card, he handed me the machine, and said, “You can approve the charge here. And add the tip if you want.”

Fine, cool.  So I hit the green button, okaying the base charge, I go to the next screen, selecting, Yes I’d like to leave a tip, and I start to enter the amount. It’s like one of those old calculators, where each digit you enter moves the decimal place to the right, (starting with 6 cents, then you add a zero to make sixty and so on).

Well I got to .60 cents, and for some reason the waiter snatched the machine out of my hand… I guess I was taking to long or something. Cause he snatched it up, looked at the screen.

“I wasn’t done… I need to finish”.

“I’ll finish” he said.

“No I mean the amount isn’t right.” And I try to take the machine back, I get it just in my hands and ready to add the final zero, and he snatches it back.

He completes the transaction, prints my receipt. He looks at it carefully, “Did you mean to leave sixty cents tip?” he asks.

“No,” I said. “I meant to leave you six pounds, but you snatched the machine out of my hand before I could finish, and you wouldn’t listen to me that the amount was wrong.”

He looks at me like suggesting I could leave cash, I look at him like there is no way in the world I was going to do that.

“Sorry dude. But now I guess you know the value of a decimal point.”

(and of not snatching shit out of my hands, I thought.)

So, there’s a joke here somewhere…

The Traveler: 


Deplaning in Warsaw there didn’t seem to be any customs or boarder control to speak of. This isn’t unusual, both the Czech Republic and Poland are EU-ish countries, and frequently there isn’t much boarder control between them. (Except when you go to England. They hate you in the UK nearly as much as we hate people coming into the US –the lines are so damned long that by the time you get in… you’re wondering why you ever wanted to in the first place). Point being we weren’t worried about the general lack of controls in place.

What we were worried about was getting the hell out of there before Borat Extra found us.

“We need to roll, brother.” Said KP.

And so we set off, only to shortly thereafter discover that the Warsaw airport is like the Hotel California… (for you Justin Bieber fans, that means: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.)

“This is an incredibly innovative method of boarder control…” I commented.

“And economic stimulus.” KP is a financial analyst, dry as a bone, and I find him Earth-shatteringly funny.

“That’s gotta be the racket. Don’t let us leave, make us spend all our money at high-end shopping venues, and then ship us away on the next plane”. I commented.

“It’s perfect. Economic Stimulus, and they protect their organic resources from our otherwise locust like consumption.”

That was probably a pretty true piece of insight. Although I suspect the natural resources the Polish government was trying to protect were Polish girls.  My God, Man. I have never been to a place –even California— with more drop dead gorgeous girls per square mile.

Only a rave at Karl Lagerfeld’s house would surpass the beauty per capita of the streets of Warsaw.

But to see that, first we’d have to actually leave the airport. Which was – basically impossible.

Now, as a frequent traveler, I got over pretty quickly the male genetic disposition against asking for directions. In fact, as a tip to the wise, asking for directions is often he best way to escape an airport that seems otherwise designed to keep you in, and surround you with tempting tchotchkes.

We walked right up to the first peron we could find with a security badge.

“How do we get out?” I asked.

She looked at me blankly.

KP tried simplier words: “Leave? Exit?”

She shook her head, “Not information, security.” She showed us her badge.

“I’m not asking if you work for information, I’m asking if you have any. Specifically, how to get out of the airport.” I said bluntly.

“No.” she responded in kind.

“Fucking fantastic.” I said.

We walked off.

“It’s a relic of the Soviet system, she doesn’t want to be seen talking to us, in case they accuse her of being a collaborator with enemy agents.” KP said.

“We’re not enemy agents.” I said flatly.

“In Poland, everyone is an enemy agent.” KP Added.

“We’re here for your women,” I shouted. “Bring me virgins!”

“That kind of attitude will get us shot, dude.”

Eventually we did get out of the Warsaw airport, and it might have involved acts that danced rather anarchisticly with the authority. But I’ll not reveal our methods here, as such knowledge is certainly a state secret.

But the story doesn’t end there, friends.

After an amazing event, including a round of standing applause, and riding a real rock-star high. A high that was totally unexpected since I was totally unsure how my particular shtick would play when translated into polish. I went back to the airport to catch my flight to London.

Leaving the country everything seemed especially normal. Stand in line to check in, stand in line to get through security, make it through security with no real trouble, not even a passing brush against my genitalia, which was really disappointing since there are all order of tall, blonde, utterly gorgeous girls in the Warsaw Airport Police. I walk towards my gate, and I’m presented with another line.

Boarder Control.

I’m crazy confused here. I look around for other signs… but they’re all pointing as though my gate is beyond this checkpoint. I don’t want to go through here and accidently wind up outside of security. I consider briefly the effort needed to get into the country, which builds my confidence, there's no way they'd let me leave that easily. I wonder if I took a wrong turn. I look into the faces of other people in line, I recognize some from the security and ticketing lines –and they all accept this as perfectly normal. So I adopt rule of traveling #1: Fit In, and I go with the flow.

Ahead of me the boarder agent, a drop dead Amazonian blonde, is hassling some poor bastard. I dial up the charm when it’s my turn.

“Is this the way to gate 14?” I ask, a little lost, a little confused, a dash of vulnerability. Cops like that. I’m hoping that it plays well with a cop who is just hare’s breath away from being a supermodel.

“Yes,” she smiles. She flips through every page of my passport, inspecting the various visa. “Your picture doesn’t look like you.”

“I’ve lost a lot of weight. I have a driver’s license.” I show her that.

“You’re much prettier now.” She says.

“Thanks,” I say, now gushing a little bit.

She stamps my passport and says in parting: “Enjoy your stay.”

I give her the big smile, walk through, go to gate 14, board my plane and leave.

The punch-line: in Poland, they stamp your entrance visa, when you leave the country. 

So, I get dragged into an international incident in the former Soviet Block.

The Traveler: 


Prague. It’s a wonderful town. A cheep town, which is a thing of wonder in Europe. When you can have a top notch dinner for 40 bucks a head including drinks, you know you’ve found a place you need to come back to.  Apparently Prague also wasn’t totally blown to hell during the war, and as a result has much of its natural and historic beauty intact. In short… I suppose you get the point, I like it. Which is a good thing since there was a damn good chance I wasn’t going to be able to leave.

Entering the country was easy, deplane, minimal customs, observe with minor interest that the Czech national police traded their AK-47’s for MP5’s with double magazines – like both acknowledging that the AK as an international symbol is the gun of the bad guys –and that’s not them anymore, and at the same time stating quietly, we are fully prepared to jack your shit up.

In short, this was a police force to be respected, possessing an aura that suggested willingness to disappear someone if needed.

Leaving the country turned into a bit of a challenge. Mostly made worse by me.

The rules of security are different country to country, so I took a moment to familiarize myself before proceeding to the checkpoint. Fluids in bag, laptop, camera, and ipad out, they didn’t require taking off my boots, but I started to anyway.

“No-No… leave them on…” said the guy operating the metal detector.

“No, I should take them off, they’re cowboy boots, they have a steel shank”.

“Boots on.” He insisted.

When a dude with an MP5, 80 rounds of ammo, and the ability to pump all of those into you in less than 30 seconds tells you to keep your boots on, you do.

I walk through, and bleep. – of course.

We go through the rigmarole of: do I have paper, do I have coins, do I have a thermonuclear warhead in my pants, I say no and walk through again. Bleep.

“It’s the boots” I said.

He was having none of it.  He pulls me aside for a pat down. Fine. I’ve done this 1000 times, ain’t nothing but a thang, right?

Wrong. As the guard is patting me down, someone else calls over to me. “Hey buddy where you from?”

Now, I must admit that while I’m not generally into small-talk anyway, when a member of the Czech National Police is cupping my balls, I’m not what-you-wanna-call predisposed to idle chitchat.

But I was disoriented in the way you get when someone else literally has your balls in their hands, and for some dumb assed reason I answered: “Dallas, Texas.” I don’t know why… I figured this might be some kind of Soviet era interrogation technique.

It wasn’t.

It was some short, fat, random eastern European guy, with his wife and kids, looking for all the world like he’d just stepped out of Borat two.

Also worth noting was that he, his babushka, and offspring were presently surrounded by a fully functioning combat team of CNP.

I looked up into the eyes of the cop who was patting me down. He had precisely the look a guy with a sub-machinegun gets when he has your balls in his hand: Steely eye’d, tough, aggressive, and little bit uncomfortable.

I’d seen enough cold-war era movies to know how this would go. He’d say:  Do you know this man? I’d say No, fuck, he’s just some random eastern European asshole who started talking to me, and quick as shit, me and the Borat Extra would be serving life sentences in some gulag together. He’d probably teach me how to make Borsht, and I’d school him on motorcycle repair, and we’d eventually become friends, setting the stage for a made for TV movie, at least until I sold him out to the guards for better food.

Fuck.

We didn’t get a chance to have that conversation though because Borat Extra wanted to draw me further into his drama first. “So guy. In America, what do you do if they want to pat your kid down, huh?”

I grinned, smiled at the guards –yes guards, now there were two, attending me… and just kind of shrugged.

“They want to touch my kid, they don’t find nothing. Tell me is that right, they should touch my kid?” Borat Extra asked.

I turn trying to look away, and now there’s three guards on me… one is taking apart my luggage. The business class line behind me –there had been no line when I stepped up—was now like 25 people deep. Waiting or watching the spectacle I have no idea which.

The three guards, are running every article of my clothing, examining my liquids, riffling through my stuff, and yes, occasionally coming back to fondle my balls.

“I don’t know this guy…” I said to the guard. That was stupid because then he rightly asked: “Why would you say that? Why do you think we think you might know him?”

Fuck.

Now guy’s wife chimes in saying some shit in some language I don’t know… this takes Borat Extra to an all new plane of pissed off instigation. “This is a crime. You there” He points at me. “You’re a witness.”

Now I’m pissed. “I am absolutely not a fucking witness, dude. Seriously these cops could take you out back and execute you, and I won’t have seen anything.”

I look up at ball holding cop, who has since let go. “Seriously.”

“We don’t do that. Why would you say that?” he asked again.

Fuck. My instincts… my training on how to deal with situations like these was inculcated to me during the cold war. I’m a cold warrior. I don’t know how you’re supposed to act in a liberalized former Eastern Block country. I am saying and doing all the wrong things.

“I don’t fucking know dude… I’ve seen too many movies…” I say.  “I’m sorry. I appreciate you guys being thorough. We all just wanna get where we’re going safely.”

The words, or the tone were magical. That or because there was absolutely nothing to find on me… the CNP were done, with me I put my stuff away and got ready to step off…

Borat Extra wouldn’t let me leave easy though… “This is a violation of international law. You searched me and my kid, and didn’t find nothing. This is a violation of international law, you can’t hold us and make us miss our plane.” He looked at me. “You tell them.”

“Dude, international law isn’t my specialty.” I look over at the guard who is walking towards me. “I just want to get to Warsaw.”

Borat Extra heard this, “Warsaw! We go to Warsaw too… Go Dallas Cowboys!”

Fuck.

Afterward: On the Prague to Warsaw flight I was seated in Business, and fortunately Borat Extra was not. He did make the flight, though, and sat within three seats of my traveling companion (who was stuck in coach) KP, who has all order of stories of his rants and raves… but this isn’t his blog.