I'm back in the States for a brief interlude in between trips. I head to Milan next.
I left Pangbourne yesterday morning for Gatwick and found the place just packed to the rafters. I've never seen an airport that crowded, not even O'Hare at Thanksgiving. Since my elite flier's status on NorthWorst Disorient Airlines has expired, I wound up standing in line for 30 minutes waiting to check in while some fat tatooed girl who looked like Kelly Osbourne kept flirtily sticking her pierced tongue out at me. Ick. Finally, when I was about to give up all hope, a security guard approached and asked me if I'd be willing to undergo a baggage search which would allow me to jump the queue. Of course I said yes, hallelujah Jesus, yes!
Some bored and slightly disgusted looking woman did a perfunctionary reshuffling of my dirty socks and underwear, and I was up at the front of the line in 2 minutes. Meanwhile, I was bemused to see an Iranian man with a full beard and wearing classic holy-warrior/religious-police get-up make his way through the line without so much as a sideways glance from security. But no doubt if he were a terrorist, he'd be tripped up by those fiendishly clever questions that the security officers at Gatwick still quiz you with:
"Did you pack your bags yourself?"
"Yes"
"Did anyone give you anything to carry on board?"
"Yes...I mean NO! Curse you, and your fiendishly clever questions, infidel dogs! By the beard of the Prophet, you have caught me, how you say? Red-handed!"
To be fair, he was on my flight and only tried to hijack the plane once...right after they announced that "Down With Love" and "Kangaroo Jack" would be the in-flight movies.
I made my way through the security checkpoint, held up only briefly while some Nigerian guy spent 5 or 6 minutes emptying out all of the pockets of his dashiki. I kept waiting for him to produce a small goat or chicken from within it's smelly folds.
After waiting about 30 minutes at the designated gate, I noticed that our flight no longer appeared on the monitors. This did not bode well. After a few minutes, someone came over and told me that my plane had been changed. I made my way to the new gate which required me to pass yet again through security! I made it to the gate just as they were beginning boarding.
Thanks to my fucked company's wonderfully stupid policy of buying only non-upgradable tickets on international flights, my journey home was spent squeezed into a tiny aisle seat in the center row of a DC-10. The annoying loud yobbos in the adjacent seats kept climbing over top of me to reach the aisle. Apparently, asking politely that I stand up and let them pass was too much trouble. The couples behind me talked incessantly and very loudly during the film and kept grabbing my headrest whenever they stood up. I could hear them clearly through my earplugs. The lager lout in the next seat over kept playing elbow hockey with me in an attempt to hog my portion of the armrest. No one paid any attention whatsoever to the Fasten Seatbelts sign.
Say what you want about the Ugly American on holiday, but I think the average Brit has them beat for sheer unpleasantness. Insert obligatory Monty Python quote about "bleeding pints of bleeding Watney's Red Barrel" here.
We were served two meals on the flight, some sort of vegetable pasta and a slice of pizza that smelled like the dog's business and tasted like dirt, both were completely inedible.
I finally landed, passed through Customs, and waited 30 minutes for my bag to show up, it was the very last one off the plane.
I can't wait to do this all again next Saturday.
You tend to watch a lot of television when you're cooped up in a French industrial park and the nearest village is a 30-minute walk away. Consequently, I gleaned a lot of valuable insights into European cable programming. Surprise, surprise, it's exactly like US cable programming; reruns of bad comedies, too much news, sports, and game shows. So much for the average american's perception of the French as a bunch of effete, intellectual snobs reclining languidly on the divan, munching escargots, while they watch Jean Cocteau films on the telly. Instead, I was treated to such dubbed american fare as: Daria, Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, and Married With Children. Granted, those last three were all on the German-language channel. 
Spock: "Das würde ziemlich unlogisch sein"
Next stop was the 
