Airport tourism
Half-awake I made my way from one plane to the next. My first trip to U.S. consisted of visits to the Minneapolis and Atlanta airports. After clearing U.S. customs I had to quickly drink all of my water to go through yet another security scan. Somehow my belt went missing and no one was able to find it. I decided to do some Minnesota research while I waited for my plane. I found an interesting Minnesota souvenir shop, and it was full of bears, moose, loons, and Scandinavian jokes. It could almost have been Canadian. There was a hot dish (a.k.a casserole) cookbook, t-shirts with Paul Bunyan, and even a box of ´Ole and Lena´ fortune cookies (instead of fortunes they had Scandanavian jokes). It turns out the best place to find interesting facts is by looking at children´s books. I learned that Lindenbergh, Schultz, and Garland were all from that state. Next, I was intrigued by the vending machines for scratch cards, electronics, and Rosetta Stone language CD-roms. When I learned my plane would be an hour late I went on the 1.4 mile loop reccomended by the American Heart Association around the airport. While exercising my heart and passing the time I saw an interesting bronze art exhibit.

My next stop was the Atlanta airport which was much busier and crazier than the last. All I had to was listen to the folks around me and I gotta hear a nice southern Georgian drawl. The souvenirs promoted peaches and pandas, and I soon found myself reading the ´G is for Georgia´ book that talked about baseball and Dr. King. What most caught my eye were the honey jars from the Savannah bee company with flavours, such as ´tupelo´, ´black sage´, and ´orange blossom´. We´ll see if I have time to stop on my way back. In every corner there was a TV playing excerpts from the CNN news, but then I discovered some live Jazz music in the food court in Concourse E. As I walked back to T for my flight I saw an amazing art exhibit with huge stone sculptures from Zimbabwe.

The third flight was the longest, but since I was sitting next to a doctor from Argentina I felt quite safe. I learned a little about the local politics, a new name for ´pen´ in Spanish (sort of a British vs American English thing), and the local slang word ´flashar´ (spelling?) which means to be impressed or attracted by someone ( not what an English speaker might first guess).