The non-zones

Airports. In a way, I love them, they are often connected to new adventures, new places and great expectations. On the other hand, it's a lot of waiting, boredom, goodbyes and existential crisis. Airports are similar non-zones regardless where you are, places that do not have any characteristics except for the characteristics of your own trip and flight experience. You can be at the airport of Bangkok or Cairo without realizing it, it could be London or Helsinki as well. The only trouble you have is with the currency exchange rate.

In the past one month or so I have spent too much time at the airports. It makes traveling annoying and boring. The glory of air traveling has lost its attractiveness. And indeed, the glory was very far on my trip to Luxembourg last Monday. The autumn storm was disrupting ("irregularities" as the flight companies put it) air traffic in Amsterdam so I was ordered to fly through Copenhagen. Why not, the Danish guys are tall and handsome. 

However, the storm had already advanced to Southern Sweden and Denmark. With our second try, we finally managed to land to very windy Copenhagen (people were vomiting at the back of the plane, I was meditating) and the airport was then closed (also trains and metros stopped working). I got in a transit center queue with a Danish sandwich and a beer and calculated that it would take around 20 hours to serve the 800 customers in line in front of me. "Luckily" after 1 hour 40 min, I realized that I had been waiting in a wrong queue and eventually took a number for the correct counter. Only 100 numbers before me (and a tall and handsome Finn!).

Too bad I was overly focused on getting a new flight to Luxembourg (+hotel room) so I wasn't able to go around in the Copenhagen airport which is probably one of the nicest ones in Europe. You find there good shops and many different kinds of cafés or restaurants, unlike in Helsinki-Vantaa airport where you only get one type of vegetarian sandwich in all the cafés of the airport. No wonder my friend told me on Facebook to concentrate on shopping and not on the tall and handsome Danish guys.

Usually I tend to connect airports with lots of emotions. Crying out loud at the counter in Paris-Orly when I had misunderstood the flight schedule (I made it however and got in time to Berlin to see my new boyfriend), buying a 300 EUR Ryanair flight to London when I had foolishly missed my initial flight (and got to see my boyfriend - not the same one - almost in time), leaving my Senegalese tax-free products in Madrid security check (not properly packed liquids) after a lot of negotiations and - on the more positive side - all the proseccos I have enjoyed in order to celebrate a wonderful upcoming adventure. 

Something that I also find thrilling at the airports are other people traveling and expecting great adventures, the feeling of big expectations. It can be contaminating. But then, you also have these usual Brussels bureaucrats, dryly moving from one capital to another.

Airports can also be a place for cultural shocks. When I arrived to the luxurious airport of Bangkok after traveling on budget in Cambodia and Laos, I was disgusted by the boutiques of Louis Vuitton and Prada and the glittering diamonds and golden watches in the shop windows. At the Arlanda airport in Stockholm, on my way from Addis Abebe back to Finland, I was depressed by the Starbucks café (and capitalism): after all the excellent Ethiopian coffee that was roasted before my eyes, I was just uninterested by the Swedish barista asking me if I wanted my cappuccino with a single or double shot, tall/medium/large and made with Guatemalan/Columbian/Costa Rican/Ethiopian /Kenyan /+10 other choices coffee. "Just give me a bloody coffee, will you!" The modern capitalism has given us the illusion of liberty to choose, but to choose what, the coffee beans for my toffee frappuccino latte macchiato. Who cares, and does this illusion of endless choices make anyone happier (I'd say it's the opposite, and what the fuck is "tall cappuccino" in any case)? 

The luxury at the airports can be also nice in certain circumstances. After rough traveling, I love to go to the duty-free shop in my hiking outfit, wearing my last almost-clean clothes and try on the super expensive Sisley hand cream (and wonder who the heck will pay 100 euros for a hand cream), some lipstick and perfume and think that I'm ready for the urban life once again. 

To conclude, here are some of my observations about some airports I've travelled through:

- Entebbe (Uganda): UN flights leaving to South Sudan with peacekeepers on board made my own travels seem quite uninteresting.

- Istanbul: flights all over the world, Muslims wearing their best clothes on the way to Mecca or Medina. Flights to Teheran, Baghdad, Kigali etc. A place to start a real trip!

- Italian airports: last chance to have a cheap and good cappuccino on the way back home.

- Brussels: they have finally ended with the construction work of the train station at the airport, but still, arriving to Brussels still feels like arriving to some backward country in the 1970s, nothing functions. But chocolate is good and last chance to have a cheap Leffe on the way home.

- Amsterdam: the self-flushing toilets are just annoying and uncomfortable.

- JFK: you expect glory and you find concrete. What the heck?? A truly disappointing airport.

-Bujumbura (Burundi): two gates, no screens, and outside some very rusty and old Air Burundi airplanes (to be avoided).

Crémant and Krugman in Luxembourg

I spent one week in Luxembourg in a workshop on income distribution. Even if it might sound ironic, Luxembourg hosts a vast data bank of income statistics (LIS) that provide a great setting for studying income inequalities across the world. This year, a 2-day conference on middle classes was integrated into the workshop programme. I was especially excited about a keynote lecture by professor Paul Krugman. I'm not so interested in his macro-economic models on international trade for which he won a Nobel Prize but rather I know him from his New York Times columns in which he fiercely used to criticise the Bush government or talks about economics in popular (but always insightful and sometimes even funny) terms. If you check his blog The Conscience of a Liberal, you will find under the topic "Inequality and Crises" (27 June) the powerpoint show he used for his presentation to us. In a later entry from 30 June "The Icelandic Post-Crisis Miracle", he gets inspired by a presentation of an Icelandic scholar in our conference.

He didn't say anything fantastically new (and he is by no means a specialist of income distribution) but his thesis about the connection between inequality and economic depression was interesting and he also provided data to back up his theory as historical data shows that increase in inequality (measured as the share of total income owned by the top 1% of income distribution) has (always) been followed by depression (however, this has happened twice in the recorded history so making sound analyses is somewhat hard). Basically, there are three ways how to explain their relation. First, the connection is a pure hazard. Second, inequality and economic depression may have a common cause, for example neo-liberal ideology. Or third, inequality actually causes macro-economic instability. Krugman focused on the second possibility and tried to provide evidence that the neo-liberal or republican policies have simultaneously led us towards a more unequal society and more vulnerable economic system.


Krugman's lecture took place in Arcelor-Mittal's (the huge steel company) headquarters in an old palace where the audience included some royal members of Luxembourgian duchy and some elite members of the country. The workshop participants were remarkably underdressed, but at the reception after the lecture, waiters poured us crémant (the bubbling wine of Luxembourg) with no discrimination.


Of course we were all childishly excited about Krugman (first observation: oh, he's short). Some of us bought his book to later get a signature in it (I regret that I didn't) and we all got in a group photo with him (very exciting). On our way to a conference dinner, I had the opportunity of making him laugh – not directly speaking to him but telling a joke loud enough so he could hear it as well. A young American researcher got to sit next to him during the dinner and afterwards, her eyes were shining as if she had just met the boy of her dreams. But I guess that seeing Matt Damon jogging in the Central Park still goes ahead of this intellectual event...