I'm about four and a half degrees north of the equator, the closest I've ever been, and I'll be danged if that wasn't Cuba we flew right over.
The fire extinguishers are a little different here, there are fire-axes in glass cases on the walls, and police wear green uniforms. Also, you get a half-hearted frisking even if you don't go through customs. Because of this, Colombia may forever live on in my mind as the country of generous frisking.
Otherwise, differences are few and far between. The condition of the facility itself is pretty run-of-the-mill. The furnishings look no more recent than O'Hare's or Miami International's, and the bathrooms, if they can serve as a microcosm of a building as a whole, suggest a pretty well-kempt airport. I'd love to have been able to see Bogota in the daylight, especially considering the strange arrangements of lights off in what I think is the west. They looked as though they were slowly climbing the base of a mountain: my first Andes of the trip?
I'm disappointed to find that my English-speaking seems not only forgivable, but expected. Flight attendants and security personnel readily accommodate my foreign language, and I'm almost too embarrassed to try Spanish. I did, however, manage to ask for a glass of orange juice on the plane without insulting anyone's mother, eliciting a smirk from both the flight attendant and the nine-year-old sitting next to me. It would have been a flawless victory if I hadn't nodded idiotically to her reply, "yellow?," which was not a reference to the color of the drink but in fact the Spanish word for ice. Lesson one, F-.
They're airing coverage of the Democratic National Convention on Noticias, the local news network. Hillary was there?
It's a compact international terminal here in Bogota, and very detached from the rest of the airport, so my exploring is abrupt. I'm content to wait patiently for my connection though, and I should get into Santiago International a little before dawn.
Although, it is the other side of the planet here, so dawn might not be as early as I've gotten used to in the Northern hemisphere sun...
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