Lydia’s Blog

THIS POST DATES FROM NOV. 6, 2006
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So today I had the colossal good luck to fly on the very first day of Europe’s new “American style” regulations on liquids in carry-on. If I watched TV or listened to the radio, I might have picked up on that. As it was…I didn’t.

It’s a real shame, this. Flying within Europe was a unique joy…untouched by wide-eyed, code-orange hysteria. One would show up to the airport an hour or so before a flight…less if there were nothing to check in, stand in a short line for a boarding card, then in another one to pass through security (without having to remove belts or shoes, mind you…), and then have ample time for a quick browse through a duty free shop and/or an overpriced coffee before hopping on the plane.

Well. Those days are over. As wave after panicked wave of uninformed travelers arrived to spectacular lines (Germans don’t get so gay for queuing as, say, the British), plastic baggies, and the prospect of losing hundreds of Euros worth of male-grooming products to stone-faced security controllers, tiny mob scenes began to break out. People started shouting at airport employees, desperate not to miss their flights. People in line began to trample one another…people with earlier flights attacking people ahead of them, when it was found that they would fly a meager ten, maybe fifteen minutes later. Desperate people, especially desperate people before 6 a.m. are not good-humored or generous. They can barely even be considered decent. Or human. It’s not without some irony that I began to think about terrified Berliners trying to connive their way onto transports out of Berlin as the Soviet army circled the doomed city from the East….today it was overweight, groggy Bosch and Porsche employees trying to get to Frankfurt.

Oh, the fatherland. Cruel fate.

I derived special pain from being forced, passively, to listen to conversation after conversation about how base American paranoia was condemning evolved Europeans to a halitosis-ridden business trip (owing to the toothpaste ban). Ugh, the Americans. They can hang Saddam Hussein…so why can’t I at least have my L’Occitaine hair pomade?

How did I survive the ordeal, you ask? Well, the American way—naturally. I snuck to the front of the mob, quietly offered a 20 Euro bill to what was obviously a college student, and slid through the entire mess without much problem.

See, nobody can trump American-style jackassery like an American.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 11:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.