Yesterday's Flight Has Left
This afternoon I had a trip to the airport to pick up my brother-in-law who was flying in from Barcelona to spend a couple of weeks visiting his parents. It's August, the month for vacations and visits home. More than half the tourists visiting Galicia are emigrants who have come to visit family.
There has been a new airport terminal in Santiago since September of 2011. It's a large, white box of a building with a slightly domed ceiling and plate glass windows stretching from floor to ceiling. It's divided into two main floors and three basement parking garages, including the rental cars. The bottom floor, where the taxis wait in line, is dedicated to arrivals. It's a long, empty area broken by two elevators and staircases, and a small café. There's only one arrival gate with opaque sliding white doors into which you can see baggage carousels only when passengers come out. That's where everyone stretches their head, trying to see if they can see who they've come to meet.
Upstairs is the departure area, bigger, with the check-in counters, a kiosk (the only one in the entire place), and a large cafeteria that also serves light meals. The top floor is open to the ceiling, and there are white steel pillars branching out like trees, holding up the roof. Everything is grey and white, from the grey granite floors to the white-painted girders.
I miss the old terminal. Its white and green marble floors resound in my memory of childhood travels. It had only one floor,with arrivals at one end and departures at the other and the check-in counters near the departures. There was a top floor, but only for departure gates. It even had a tower at one end from where you could watch the planes on the runway. In later years this was closed, but you could still see the planes from some tables in the restaurant that were placed right in front of plate glass windows that looked out on the runway. I remember the walls were painted light green and there was a mural in the recessed wall above the check-in counter, very 70's style, in a design that looked like green and cream colored ribbons, I think I remember. Every time I set foot in that terminal I would grow nostalgic, remembering when, as a child, I would step off the plane after the last leg of the trip, flying in from Madrid. I always remember the fresh, chill morning air as I would walk down the ringing metal steps from the belly of the airplane to the bumpy tarmac below.
It was a small airport that knew it was small, but proud it communicated with others yet bigger. There was a provincialism that was like an embrace of a warm, chubby mother who takes her child in her arms with love. When you arrived at the terminal you knew you were in a house you'd known all your life. You'd seen those very same marble floors in a neighbor's house. There was almost a direct communication with the exterior world in the terminal. There were flies that came in through open doors. Passing by some of the doors the smell of grass or wet earth would wander in. To get to the cars, you had to go outside, cross the street and enter an outdoor parking lot, where the cars were covered with corrugated roofs, yet the lanes were open to the sky. There was an almost immediate contact with nature upon leaving the building. Especially if it were raining.
Now that feeling is gone. It's become an impersonal terminal pretending to be the sister of the great terminals in Madrid or Barcelona. There is no magical connection with nature. The parking lot is in the basement and, though it is open to the air on one side, you really have no connection to the surrounding nature. All the duty-free stores that anyone could visit in the old terminal are now inside the security area. You can only wander the kiosk while waiting for someone to arrive. The magic is gone.
There has been a new airport terminal in Santiago since September of 2011. It's a large, white box of a building with a slightly domed ceiling and plate glass windows stretching from floor to ceiling. It's divided into two main floors and three basement parking garages, including the rental cars. The bottom floor, where the taxis wait in line, is dedicated to arrivals. It's a long, empty area broken by two elevators and staircases, and a small café. There's only one arrival gate with opaque sliding white doors into which you can see baggage carousels only when passengers come out. That's where everyone stretches their head, trying to see if they can see who they've come to meet.
Upstairs is the departure area, bigger, with the check-in counters, a kiosk (the only one in the entire place), and a large cafeteria that also serves light meals. The top floor is open to the ceiling, and there are white steel pillars branching out like trees, holding up the roof. Everything is grey and white, from the grey granite floors to the white-painted girders.
I miss the old terminal. Its white and green marble floors resound in my memory of childhood travels. It had only one floor,with arrivals at one end and departures at the other and the check-in counters near the departures. There was a top floor, but only for departure gates. It even had a tower at one end from where you could watch the planes on the runway. In later years this was closed, but you could still see the planes from some tables in the restaurant that were placed right in front of plate glass windows that looked out on the runway. I remember the walls were painted light green and there was a mural in the recessed wall above the check-in counter, very 70's style, in a design that looked like green and cream colored ribbons, I think I remember. Every time I set foot in that terminal I would grow nostalgic, remembering when, as a child, I would step off the plane after the last leg of the trip, flying in from Madrid. I always remember the fresh, chill morning air as I would walk down the ringing metal steps from the belly of the airplane to the bumpy tarmac below.
It was a small airport that knew it was small, but proud it communicated with others yet bigger. There was a provincialism that was like an embrace of a warm, chubby mother who takes her child in her arms with love. When you arrived at the terminal you knew you were in a house you'd known all your life. You'd seen those very same marble floors in a neighbor's house. There was almost a direct communication with the exterior world in the terminal. There were flies that came in through open doors. Passing by some of the doors the smell of grass or wet earth would wander in. To get to the cars, you had to go outside, cross the street and enter an outdoor parking lot, where the cars were covered with corrugated roofs, yet the lanes were open to the sky. There was an almost immediate contact with nature upon leaving the building. Especially if it were raining.
Now that feeling is gone. It's become an impersonal terminal pretending to be the sister of the great terminals in Madrid or Barcelona. There is no magical connection with nature. The parking lot is in the basement and, though it is open to the air on one side, you really have no connection to the surrounding nature. All the duty-free stores that anyone could visit in the old terminal are now inside the security area. You can only wander the kiosk while waiting for someone to arrive. The magic is gone.
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