We're now in Hamburg, having arrived this morning from Stansted. We had to leave at the crack of dawn, so it meant that we (or some of us, anyway) slept for a couple hours, then we all got up and went to the airport.
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We flew on Ryanair, which was, as they say, a trip. Briefly, though I'm going to be traveling on them quite a bit these next few days-- I go back to the Stansted area on Tuesday to give a talk, so I'm going to be pretty familiar with this run before I go home-- I find Ryanair pretty horrifying. Not because they're a thousand times more evil than, say, Southwest Airlines; but for aesthetic reasons.
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The interior of a Ryanair plane feels like it was designed by someone who was inspired by a gas station bathroom designed by Lego. It's done up in yellow and dark blue, and it manages to remind me of the Ryanair Web site, which itself is a digital disaster area. The seats don't recline. The tray tables feel cheap, and have advertisements on them. There are no seat pockets in front of you. Above the tray tables, in the space where real airlines have little movie screens, are posted the instruction cards that normally go in the seat pockets (which don't exist). I suppose it's better than not having them at all, but it increases the visual clutter of the space tenfold, and subtly communicated the idea that "you're going to crash." Taken together, the whole effect is really something.
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Stansted Airport is also an interesting cultural experience. On one hand, in the wee hours it's filled with backpackers who've crashed on their bedrolls and are waiting for their flights to wherever; on the other, it's one of the more frenetic airport shopping experiences I've ever seen. Not two populations you think of as overlapping, but I suppose everyone like cheap flights.
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I think it's a testament to European unity that the EU has managed to survive in the age of EasyJet and Ryanair, and more generally the globalization of bad behavior that they've enabled. Brussels is still moving forward on currency reform and eggplant standardization despite the fact that some of the most regular contact between people from different countries comes not through cultural exchange programs or art exhibits, but soccer hooliganism, bachelor parties, and sex tourism.
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