It was mid afternoon in the local time when we touched down at George Bush Intercontinental - a well laid out, thoughtfully designed piece of architecture in Houston - the first land outside of my time zone I had ever laid tire upon. Exiting the plane was as much an ordeal as entering it, but as soon as I was in the terminal - and after fighting a crowd of my fellow passengers for use of the restroom facilities - Elisabeth and I began our epic journey across the airport to the flight that would, ultimately, land us at SFO.
It was apparent that we were in Texas from the get go. The air possessed a beany, meaty quality and the whole of the place smelled of beer. Contrasting this, the walls of the terminal were curving and polished white, possessing a space station quality about them. This is in difference, mind you, to the space stations of today - metal cylinders screaming through space, packed with technology and held together by hope in an apt analogy to modern air transit. No, this place resembled a great Asimov-esque vision of a tomorrow that will never come.
I could easily envision such a place playing host to elegant dignitaries from the horse head nebula, or brutal mercenaries from Gliese 581. This illusion was aided by the fact that people were zooming about in golf carts, and the automated messages in the trams were in far more than simply English and Spanish. The myriad of languages felt so cosmopolitan - so fresh. "Why don't we get this shit in Georgia?" I remember muttering.
It's rather sad that I didn't have time to appreciate the place better - to stop and smell the whiskey, as it were - for we were late for our connection and time was of the essence. We even skipped the duty free store - horror of horrors - just to make it to our plane in time. When, at last, we arrived, we boarded the great United 767. After again getting stuffed into an aisle wheelchair and rolled down the impossibly tight aisles to what would be my confinement for the next four hours, I remembered my brother - a pilot in training - warning me about how shitty United was. I had thought he was exaggerating and that my experience on the regional jet had just been due to it being a regional jet, but the second I was aboard those corporate vampires began their god awful cocktease.
I was glad of the TVs at each seat, filling my brain with endless distraction from the fact that I was not yet in Berkeley. Cruelly, this was torn from me by their demands for money upon takeoff. They dangled the hope of diversion before me, like keys before a baby, snatching them away once we were in the air and forcing me to be neighborly. And so, I turned to Elisabeth... who was neck deep in Plants Vs. Zombies. Ruing my cruel fate, I turned on my music player, pulled up some Alexandrov Ensemble music, and began wishing Aeroflot did US routes. I went to order a vodka, only to notice that it was the gutterwater commonly known as Absolut and decided to stay absolut-ly sober for the duration of the flight.
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