Ice Cream over the Sahara

Dulles was a house of madness. This rather perplexed the TSA agents, who remarked that it looked more like 5pm on a Friday before a summer holiday weekend than 3pm on an nondescript Wednesday in April. There was a Chinese tour group that was holding up my check-in line. We'd only wanted to check in at the kiosks and quickly rid ourselves of our checked luggage like stinky garbage.

But there they were, the wired, loquacious foreigners who had no idea that they'd already missed their flight.

Then there was the sorting of the hominids and their belongings - a portioning of the haves and the have-mores into two security screening lines; one for business and first class and the other, long, long one for steerage, so as to further increase the incentive to wait less by having more.

I sat at the gate waiting for my colleagues who were joining me in a business trip to Africa. As I relaxed, devouring my Times, an off-duty flight attendant found the quiet vacancy next to me suitable to chat with her beau on her mobile. She described in detail how she was deprived of her dress in flight. The reader should now lower his or her eyebrows as I endeavor to explain. The flight attendant cozied up in her pajamas on in a vacant business class seat on a four hour break on a half-full (in what I can only presume to be a Trans-Pacific) flight. She had neatly deposited her folded dress on the seat next to her. When she awoke, she found a snoozing passenger next to her. Perturbed, but reluctant to stir slumber, she ignored the probable economy ticket holder, no doubt sleepless, seeking out premium upgrade. When the flight attendant awoke, the passenger and her dress were gone. They discovered the insomniac thief curled up in First class with the flight attendant's dress bawled up by the window beside the passenger's head, reeling in its reincarnation as a pillow.

Seven brief hours is all it takes to cross the Atlantic these days and get yourself to Brussels, that manilla envelope of boulevards and strange architecture. Seven hours is exactly the sum of one movie (the new Tron) followed by another (that new movie about the Russian gulag filled with painfully accented actors, none of whom are actually Russian), followed by a slew of garbage television programming all viewed on a screen too small and too dim to view anything, all in a seating space designed specifically to torture, physically, anyone who dare grow over 5'11', the maximum height for NASA astronauts.

In Brussels, I succeeded in tricking my colleagues into taking the train from the airport to the city centre (spelled that way in Europe) rather than taking a cab, thus exposing them to some discomfort with the benevolent design to successfully transition them from American comfort and convenience to a more hearty African traveler disposition. We waited for the train for 40 minutes, only to find it too crowded to sit down. When we arrived, the door wouldn't open and the conductor yelled at us. The hotel was more like six blocks from the station rather than the three I promised, and it involved mostly stairs and cobblestones. Whatever. They'll thank me later.

A Belgian layover consists of a baguette lunch, a Turkish pide dinner, a lambic and a few Jupiters, and a continental breakfast. Then one is whisked from the Kansas City of Europe by easy cab (I figured my colleagues had had enough conditioning) and delivered to Starbucks and a lucky glass-ensconced airport that was built around it.

The Brussels-Monrovia flight was the kind of one I'd been waiting for for quite some time. A sunny, long six hour jaunt - above Paris, over the Mediterranean into Algeria and up over the longitudinal breadth of the Sahara. It truly is another sea - no, ocean, of sand. It went on forever - or four solid hours of flight time, whichever is longer. The hot sands even scorched my face at 38,000 feet and 40 degrees below zero, and I nibbled at a delicious ice cream cone high above the Sahara, marveling at the times.

Next up: Liberia.