STOP PRESS! Atlanta airport WORSE than LHR/ LGW!

Forgive the laziness of this posting. I admit that it's a cut and paste from an email I just sent to a friend. I'm still steeling myself for the blog about hurricane preparation that just has too much to say and will need serious editing down.

(Australian friend had just described herself as being so tired she was "flat out like a lizard drinking").

I love the slang “flat out like a lizard drinking”. I don’t entirely know what it means, having no more than the most trivial of knowledge of lizards and their habits, but I like the imagery of it. I’m in the USA at the moment, so anything figurative, metaphorical and generally not desiccated of all irony works well with me. As I’m sure I’ve banged on about a hundred times, America enthrals and appals in equal measure for me. Excuse me here while I relive a horror to help exorcise the ghost of it and deal with the stress….. I got here yesterday, having experienced the quite shocking horror of the process of arriving in Atlanta airport from an international flight. I won’t go on, but suffice to say that it was an entirely unnecessary drama and chaos that I seriously doubt even the Czech Ministry of Bullshit could have come up with. Basically, you go through immigration (drama), collect your bags (unseemly drama) then go through customs (drama). So far, so normal. However, you then re-check your bags as if embarking on a ghost flight, go through security for some ghost flight (utter drama), get a train to another part of the airport (drama as the layout of the airport makes no sense and the announcements are entirely unintelligible even to a native English speaker), get back on the train after getting off at the wrong place several times, then appear in some vast hall that merges seamlessly into a car park where there is a rabble of shouting people climbing over each other and shouting some more. This is the second baggage collection from Hell experience in an hour, but this one is so very much worse than the first. Last night, it took me nearly two hours to find the bags that I had already picked up in the same airport. As the whole thing is open to the general public, there’s always a very strong fear that it’s just been nicked by one of the many hovering n’er do wells. Just appalling: quite the worst airport experience I’ve ever had, including the Balkans, Africa and everywhere in Eastern Europe a decade ago. The whole scene was a disgrace to civilisation. The evil genius of the Bush administration is that somehow everybody blames this state of affairs on the irksomely misnamed “war on terror”. So don’t blame non-existent organisation, blame the darkies.