Adventures in Air Travel Cont…

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There are birds living inside Denver International Airport. I kid you not. I’m pretty sure they’re house sparrows, but their flighty, and my binoculars are stowed in my luggage, so I can’t give you a positive ID.

When last we met our intrepid international traveller (me), he was stuck in Prague, the victim of a late Czech Air flight and subsequent missed connection to the U.S. Prague? Not such a bad place to be stuck. But I can report, I think fairly, that Salt Lake City and Denver hold no similar charm for me at this point.

I’ve taken to enthusiastically following the little seat back TV map showing my flight’s progress, and I can confidently report that we were that close to getting into Denver last night on my flight from Frankfurt. The one that was already getting me home a day late. When the pilot, because of weather, had to put us into a holding pattern, that ultimately turned into a detour to Salt Lake City to refuel. (In fact, Salt Lake City is lovely, but not sitting on an airplane on the tarmac while the spend 90 minutes getting fuel.)

Then back to Denver, where we once again were put into a holding pattern, finally arriving four hours after our original scheduled arrival. Once I cleared Customs, the kind folks at Lufthansa (Recht schönen Dank!) got me rebooked on a flight for this morning (now Monday, I think, another day later than I intended) and a hotel voucher.

I’m a little too brain dead at 5 a.m. at gate C44 in the Denver airport to play well with the Kafkaesque metaphor that seemed so apropos in Prague. But in fact it may just be the wrong metaphor at this point. In fact, the efficient German Lufthansa bureaucracy worked with remarkable cheer and aplomb, given the entirely not human nature of the causes.

Now I’m on Delta, and they just announced that my flight has been delayed because one of the flight attendants called in sick. So it’s still unclear when I’ll get in to Albuquerque. Once I get a clearer head, I’ll try to get back to the Kafka.

Franz Kafka International

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When I told my friend Page, a veteran of European travel, that I had a connecting flight through Prague on my return to the states, she sent me a link to the Onion’s piece about Franz Kafka International being named “World’s Most Alienating Airport“.

Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments sign, Prague, July 3, 2010

I couldn’t help but think about it as I waited patiently at the Czech Air counter while they tried to rebook me onto a later flight after completing bollixing my connection.

And then, after that failed, as I waited for them to find my luggage so I could stay overnight and try again tomorrow to get home. But really, there are worse things in life than being stuck in Prague with the airline picking up the hotel bill. What a gorgeous city. Albeit with a certain self-aware melancholy. What other city has a Franz Kafka Museum and a Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments?

The Little Mermaid

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In my time wandering around Copenhagen, the Little Mermaid statue was not high on my priority list. But Tom Yulsman had arrived early for the conference and done a bit of scouting, which revealed that the statue was in fact on loan to the Shanghai World Expo. In its place down at the waterfront, Tom explained, they’ve erected a large video screen with a live feed of the Mermaid and the Chinese visitors coming to see it.

The Little Mermaid in Absentia

Kaching! That’s such an incredibly 21st century thing on several layers – the technology itself, the Chinese and Europeans reaching out for ways to understand one another via kitsch iconography. I had to go.

When I walked down there yesterday afternoon, there was a group of Asian tourists down by the water taking pictures. If I had been alert, I would have walked down to see what country they were from, but there’s where the “I was just in blogger mode” thing kicks in. So I don’t know if they were from China. But the idea of Asian tourists in Denmark looking at a live TV feed of Chinese people looking at a Danish tourist icon in China…. The layers boggle.

But here’s the best part. The tourists weren’t even looking at the video screen. They were busy taking pictures of two swans swimming nearby.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Water Conservation in a Wet Place

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From the work blog, water conservation in a wet place:

The rooftop rainwater catchment system and other features built into Kay Helt’s home and surrounding neighborhood in Stenløse, in the Danish farm country outside Copenhagen, captures some 70 percent of the annual rain that falls from the sky. It seems like a wet place – it gets two to three times the annual rainfall here that we receive in Albuquerque. But according to Sune Rotke, who showed a group of visiting U.S. and European journalists around this week, the region is overpumping groundwater for municipal consumption (sound familiar?) and has an estimated 15 to 25 years before shortages are anticipated.

200: the Eurasian Tree Sparrow

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European goldfinch, courtesy Wikimedia commons

Birdwatching in Europe is a whole new deal for me, fabulously entertaining, because pretty much everything I see wherever I go is new. And since I’m a recently minted keeper of lists, it’s also productive. Most of the time I’ve been in Denmark I’ve been working, so I’ve left the binoculars and bird book in my hotel. They’re so distracting. But I had some time this afternoon to wander some of Copenhagen’s city parks and sort out the strange new birds I was seeing. And, of course, pad my life list.

The gulls, which are actual seagulls here, have been a lot of fun. The most beautiful bird I saw today was a European goldfinch in Churchillparken, an old military fort turned into a city park, with Danish defense ministry offices clustered in the middle, still “protected” by the battlements.

But it’s fitting that the bird that seems to have fallen at number 200 on my life list was the humble Eurasian tree sparrow. I was sitting on a park bench and he was flitting around in the branches above. Looks quite similar to the ordinary European house sparrow, but different enough that I had that immediate twitchy “thats a different bird” reaction.

Even more fun, though, has been to see actual European house sparrows in Europe. Makes me chuckle every time I see one. And, just like North American, they are everywhere.

Poppies

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These things are blooming like nutso in the countryside around Copenhagen. They average around 24 inches of rain a year here, so it’s not a super wet place, but wet enough that there’s stuff growing everywhere. But not so wet that they don’t have problems with overdrafting their aquifers. Sound familiar? (More when I’m not so crazy busy with with business at hand.)

Copenhagen

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I’m headed to Copenhagen next week for a journalism workshop. While the workshop will fill most of my time there, I’ve scheduled a few extra days to play.

Suggestions?