Flight CO51Y

You wake up, somewhere above the Atlantic. It seems to you like you have slept the whole day away. But actually, you have only been dozing a few hours, that have taken you away from that unimaginable situation. To leave family, friends, work and apartment behind. Instead, you will go to school again for a year – because your employer wants it. An everyday craziness in a globalized world.

You feel your body squeezed into one of those Economy Class claustrophobia seats. In front of you, flickering images on the miniature TV screen in front of you. Next to you overweight, snoring Americans, middle-aged and middle-badly behaved. The mist of your dreams dissolves like the ice cube in your water cup. To distract yourself, you watch a Hollywood movie, of course in English. The story is predictable, the characters flat and bland. Like the remaining hours of your flight. But fortunately, your travel literature helps out. A novel full of tension about a boy growing up in Kabul in the 1970s. In German. The sneaky invasion of English into your thinking is stopped this way for the time being.

You arrive at Newark with its highfalutin title “Liberty International Airport”, but reality mocks that name. The queues seem endless in front of the border control officers. Bad-tempered, they scrutinize travel documents, take finger prints and pictures, ask questions that seemed to be answered by the lengthy visa process a long time ago. They are just doing their job, you think. Part of a giant bureaucratic machine, that has become autonomous due to security hysteria over time. But the US are not alone regarding that. Instead of fair treatment, you see a lot of unfriendliness and an intrusiveness, that lets the general suspicion towards visitors shine through. Just like the gazillion American flags in the building make clear, what exclusive country you are about to enter.

Waiting for your connecting flight after the long transatlantic flight and the immigration procedures seems irrelevant. The additional hours in the terminal do not help you to realize the dimension of this day. The generic, sterile ambiance of the airport, which could be anywhere in the US, supports that unreal feeling of yours.

The look down through the plane window onto the countryside reveals the dimension of urban sprawl and suburbanization. Fresh uprooting and new roads indicate the future metastasis’ of Greater New York/New Jersey. Pennsylvania, in contrast, is conciliatory with its farmland, rivers and rolling hills, flooded in the evening sunlight. Along one of those rivers, the density of settlements increases gradually while the plane starts to descend.
The airplane stops taxiing in front of building with the giant letters “Pittsburgh International Airport” beneath a cloudless sky. Without getting an answer, you ask yourself what it is, that you love about this country.