{"id":1619,"date":"2007-10-05T21:19:28","date_gmt":"2007-10-06T00:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1619"},"modified":"2007-10-06T06:46:07","modified_gmt":"2007-10-06T09:46:07","slug":"heathrow-sucks-and-then-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1619","title":{"rendered":"Heathrow, sucks and then II"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>alking Heathrow inside from plane or outside<\/a>about Heathrow (previously<\/a>), I just read this October 4th Boing-Boing entry about that very same airport<\/a>. Hey, lets share that pain when flying via Heathrow!\n<\/p>\n

The lines are like something out of the ninth pit of hell, especially in the Virgin terminal, and the rules about carry-ons and so forth keep getting more and more inhospitable.\n<\/p>\n

It’s those rules about the carry-ons that got me pissed off too: I had a laptop bag on my back and a camera bag on my shoulder and was tagged by security personnel, who told me that I had to put the small bag in the laptop bag. Obviously, the camera bag didn’t<\/em> fit in the laptop bag. However, I was able to strap the camera bag<\/em> on one side of the laptop bag and eventually made it back in the slow moving crowd.\n<\/p>\n

I have nicknamed it “The George Orwell Theme Park” because of that horrible, horrible security queue.\n<\/p>\n

Queue? It’s queues<\/em>. The only entertaining parts of these queues are the ‘Guess What Laptop I have’-game and ‘Guess what nation I come from’-game, that is, whenever people took out their laptops out of the bags or their passports out of their pockets (this is also where I discovered that most Canadians apparently were into Toshiba laptops<\/a>)\n<\/p>\n

December 2006: Passengers forced to queue outside in tents in freezing conditions after dense fog grounded 40% of all flights [ed. this is from the link mentioned below].\n<\/p>\n

I think I mentioned before that when I flew back to Holland, there were already doubts if my connecting flight was actually going to take off or not: It was a couple of days before Christmas, and Heathrow was in a lock down because of heavy fog. I was told I probably had to prepare myself for a run<\/em> or an ‘airport stay-over’. The moment I landed on Heathrow, all I remember seeing was an airport in chaos, line-ups and people running around trying to catch their last flight(s) to Continental Europe.\n<\/p>\n

Back to that Boing-Boing posting: I see that the British Competition Commission has warned the (Spanish) operator of Heathrow to do something about the unacceptable delays because of long security lineups<\/a>. For some kind of reason it comforts me that I wasn’t the only person going through pains to make it to my connecting flight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Talking about Heathrow (previously), I just read this October 4th Boing-Boing entry about that very same airport. Hey, lets share that pain when flying via Heathrow! The lines are like something out of the ninth pit of hell, especially in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[59,60],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}