A few hours at Nostromo-Gatwick

The reason why so many new posts got published the same day is a few hour stay at a Yotel Japanese-like cabin at Gatwick airport after missing the morning Ryanair flight to Madrid. While the next flight arrived I got myself into this underwater environment out of sheer curiosity - and was awarded a free wi-fi connection so I'm updating a few pending posts...



Lights are so dim and full of purples, pinks, pale greens and light blues here it's kind of a spaceship-like experience (actually 2001-inspired I'd say). No-one around, total silence except for the soft, regular air conditioning blowing, it's just the right place for all these fantasies coming to haunt you...



Was looking for Liutenant Ripley around the corners, but she seems to be on duty. Dommage...



By the way isn't Nostromo a much properer name for this place than Yotel? It was probably taken already though.

Geopolitics: some orange lessons

Even if it's against the message in that brilliant Orange anti-Orange turn-off-your-mobile-phone Gulliver-based commercial starred by Jack Black running on film theatres these days (I saw it last night), I'm attaching this Orange ad I saw at Nairobi airport on my way out for you don't get to see this things around in Western countries.



Don't mean we should - we have more than our fair share of anxieties already as to have posts on the walls to remind we're no longer what we used to be (don't think the average person should care too much about it either).

It's just so unusual to get your geopolitics lessons from ads rather than, say, at school!

First flag from the left is by the way Uganda's - there for closeness with Kenya I guess, rather than matching India or China as emerging powers (though you never really know these days...)

Airports and smoking (II): Dubai International Airport, Dubai, UAE

While in trasit from Nairobi at Dubai International Airport, I figured out it would be a good chance to have a cigarrette between two six-hour flights. Dubai airport being so really luxurious, it seemed it should offer equally attractive facilities to smokers in need. However, it was not the case. After a long walk through several terminals where departures gradully changed from LHR to Jaffa, you reached a small, incredibly packed and smoky room where poor addicts somehow managed to get their dose in. The “Keep door closed at all times” sign posted at the room entrance was literally impossible to respect under serious risk of suffocation.



This gave me the idea of sarting a series of photographs on smoking rooms in airports worldwide. Not than I’m too much of a traveller anyway, but I’m around every now and then. For instance, it’s widely accepted the best smoking facilities inside an airport are those ones at Barajas airport Terminal 4 in Madrid – Spain currently remaining smoker-friendly territory (not for that long though).



So this is Dubai International Airport, where a rather numerous group of rebel smokers chose to have their cigarrettes outside a specific smoking room which lied quite distant from crowded passenger traffic areas (well it was actually 5 am so crowded is a just a way of speaking).

Airports and smoking (I): Gatwick airport, London, UK

From a strictly mathematical point of view –set theory basics– a smoke ban “either within or outside a building” does actually imply a global ban – as either you are inside or outside the building.



So I was trying to locate the border between inside and outside areas, for it should be the only site where smoking is implicitly allowed. I noticed however fellow passengers weren’t being so literal about it...