Quasi-lands time zones forgot

They are airports. I have never liked layovers—I can’t think of anyone who does—but I like to think I have always been rather stoic about them. Four hours in Chicago here, five hours in San Francisco there.

But there’s nothing like the America-Africa layover. It is a marathon in lethargy, painful enough to make an actual runner out of even me.

You will reflexively doubt me, already preparing in your mind a defense of your own stay in Boston or Charlotte that somehow managed to double to six grueling hours, but I challenge you to take on anyone you know who’s done the double-trans-continental trip. Talk amongst yourselves, and let me know who wins.

Because on the JFK-Kigali route, you spend 12 to 14 hours in some fantastic European city like Amsterdam or Paris or…Frankfurt (I acknowledge the stretch), and if you’re really gung-ho, you bother to go through customs and play in town for a day. I, on the other hand, am too intimidated by the Euro even to move around within the airport.

The time stretches and stretches and stretches until I feel certain airport hours contain twice as many minutes as city hours. I eat (one small salami sandwich and one diet coke, $11); I have a coffee ($6); I listen to my iPod until the battery dies (how to express the opposite of priceless without four-letter words?). I check my email ($7.50 for half an hour) until the battery dies. I have nothing left to kill, and so I must go sleep somewhere.

In Schiphol, the Amsterdam airport, there is a magical mezzanine with beach chairs buffed up for the indoors—a little wider, straps a little thicker. It’s a chair well prepared for the worn body of a traveler in the middle of the double-continent journey, and I am determined that they must exist here too. What else does the Union in European Union mean if not that I can expect the same luxury in every European city I’m in?

But I can’t say ‘lounge chair’ in German. I have been using my German all day, going out of my way to ask questions I don’t actually need the answers to—How long is it to the city? Do I need to re-check my bag? How do you say ‘stuff in the wall that makes my laptop work,’ and where can I stick my laptop in a wall to get some? I like to think that I am trying to discard my German in a metaphorical transition from the known to the unknown, but when the woman at the ticket counter can’t tell immediately that I’m American, I realize that I am doing the most American of things, talking out loud because I like the sound of my voice. Or, rather, the German accent I have bettering so slowly over the years.

I can’t say lounge chair, so instead I approach the gatekeeper of the Fancy People Lounges and ask him, “Do you know of a place where a person could lie down in order to sleep?” He is the Hottest German I Have Ever Seen. They did not have men like this in Dresden. I am so distracted by how hot he is that I almost don’t notice him asking me if I am a certified Fancy Person. I shake my head, and he says, “I’m sorry, I don’t really know. I’m new here. It’s only my second day.” And I pull the classic American high school girl response: “I’m new here, too. It’s only my sixth hour.”

Maybe he knew all this waiting left me bereft and vulnerable, or maybe he could sense just how hot I thought he was, but he laughed so hard I’m not actually sure he’s German. I am convinced, however, that if you go back far enough, we must be related.