And so I came home again, with my itinerary merging at Helsinki with the last few English football fans who had been in Estonia for the match on Sunday evening. Around gate 37 of Helsinki airport is an art gallery, which makes a difference from the usual duty free shop, but then again they do most things better in Scandinavia if you ask me. Finland sneaks back onto the blog then, 793 days after its last appearance on 12th August 2012.
She’s certainly going for it as if it might be. Like us, this lady was in the departure lounge of Fiumicino airport, but, I suspect, leaving her home country rather than returning to it.
I only post this early when I’m travelling, and here’s the second really early one in a week. Nairobi’s airport seems to have about fifty duty free shops and one bar/café, this one. I like this shot, particularly as I wasn’t really giving it a great deal of thought, I just captured the bar scene randomly but I like the way he’s been caught. And I was only having a cup of tea. Honest, guv.
Home from Norway this morning on the twice-weekly Stavanger-Manchester flight. All of Norwegian’s planes have some Scandinavian historical personage of note on the tail fin, but I thought this was a particularly good one. I admit this picture is slightly out-of-focus, but it did best encapsulate the day.
OK, so I’m taking candid photos of attractive women again, but the light fell just right so I kinda had to.
Cafe ‘København’ (and all its menus have the quotation marks on them) resides in Copenhagen airport, where I changed planes on the way home from Norway.
Well, the ceiling of the terminal building anyway. The plane’s a model, in case you were wondering. Back home after four enjoyable days in Russia.
Perhaps I have been overdoing the travelling this year and all in all feel inclined to downshift a notch or two, but I still have three trips abroad to make in the rest of 2013, including this one. Here we sit — about 20 of us — on our terribly small and cute little plane waiting for take-off, watching these flunkies do whatever it is they do to confirm we are ready to fly. The shot was taken from out of the window visible in the reflection on the engine, above the ‘I’ between the ‘R’ and the ‘T’.
Find pleasures in airports where one can. I like people-watching (follow this blog and that’s obvious), I like the way you can get strange juxtapositions in the rush and multiple destinations of airport travellers. This was taken in Istanbul airport, waiting for my second flight.
I quite like Albania, for three reasons: 1) I did go there just for a day once (day trip from Corfu) and had a thoroughly good day, surrounded by nice people 2) they have one of the world’s coolest flags 3) the memory of a very nice…. ah, but that’s another story.
Gosh, here I am in an airport, that hasn’t happened much this year has it (sarcasm warning). Sat out a half-hour flight delay at Oslo airport (which doesn’t seem to be particularly near Oslo) by watching others watching Norway v Italy in the UEFA Under-21 championship: final score 1-1, if you’re interested. Slightly strange light on the guys in the middle but I like the shot anyway, it was taken very candidly and quickly so you never quite know how they’re going to turn out.
The title of this post is used with a mild sense of irony. Because of the role this airport wants to play — a bridge between Europe and East Asia/Australia as well as a destination in its own right — many of the flights seem to land and leave here between midnight and 3am, to fit in with flight schedules to and from countries that have stricter controls on when planes can come in and out. As a result, Abu Dhabi airport was as busy at 1am as anywhere I’ve ever been. I didn’t deliberately get a shot of these two, but was taking something of the decorative pillar in the center of Terminal 1 — as many other people were doing to pass the time — as she turned around. Cropping did the rest, it’s a bit out-of-focus but never mind, I quite like this shot.
And so, thanks to a three-hour stopover, another country, the United Arab Emirates, technically makes it onto the blog, though I don’t consider I visited the place. However, I think this shot is a little more representative than the dull one, technically of Singapore, that I got on the stopover during my flight out just over four months ago. This shot also becomes the earliest on any of the 641 days so far, and one of only four taken before 6am.
Being 42 