Music for Airports

Well I'm currently sitting in the departure lounge of Heathrow Terminal 3, waiting for my flight out to Oslo, the latest leg in my seminar tour around Europe. I've got the 'flights-through-Heathrow' bit down to a fine art now; taxi to Brighton Station, coffee and The Independent, train up to Victoria and then a half-hour trip across London on the Tube to Heathrow Terminals 1,2 & 3. It's a 5 o'clock start again, but it's either that or get a flight late in the afternoon, and I like to arrive early rather than late so at least I can get my bearings and take a look around. Of course these days actually paying for a newspaper, rather than picking up one of the freesheets (Metro in London, Metro and the Argus Lite in Brighton) is a bit of an odditity, but I'm still one of those people that secretly thinks that all this free newspaper stuff - which incidently, don't actually contain any news - is all a bit of a plot by the authorities to de-politicize the population. Or maybe I just by the Independent for the Jeremy Warner column, which I guess is rather less anti-establishment.

Anyway, I'm sitting just around the corner from Starbucks and across the way, I can see the Seafood Bar and a number of people sitting around it. That gets me thinking - just who exactly eats seafood at a bar in airports? You see them everywhere - Gatwick, Copenhagen last week, about the only place I didn't see them was Vilnius but then there wasn't any food there at all, so I guess they've got an excuse. On the same subject - why aren't there any normal clothes shops at Heathrow? It's all Gucci this, Harrods that - why don't they just open a Gap?

And on that same subject, why is the only Timberland tax-free shop in Gatwick South, meaning that to shop there I have to also suffer a flight on Ryanair to Dublin, possibly the most unpleasant plane journey you can make at the moment, and that includes the famous Aeroflot ones with standing room only and the ones in Africa with chickens in the overhead compartments. Of course it's the great irony of the budget airline revolution that if you actually have to travel on business, and the cost to you isn't a factor as your company is paying, what you get now is much worse service than five years ago, airports rammed packed full of people, and indignities such as having to find £5 cash at the counter to check your luggage in. Still, I'm travelling on SAS this morning, and apart from making you pay for a cup of coffee, at least it's a decent airline and, with an early morning flight, likely to take off in time.

Looking through Wikipedia and Wikitravel, it looks like I can get an express train down from the airport to Oslo, and my hotel, the SAS Radisson, is just next door to the central station. If I get some time, I'll try and take a look at the Munch Museum, and maybe even the City Hall with it's "spectacular main hall featuring huge murals with typical Nordic socialist themes". After that, back to the hotel, and again if I get time I want to add a section to the OWB part of my seminar on using the new interactive impact analysis and data lineage feature. Must go now though, the gate opens in about five minutes.