From Heathrow to Prague

Our flight to Prague connected through Heathrow, where we had a four hour layover. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, Heathrow is the size of a small town and filled with a Kafka-esque * maze of security checkpoints, escalators and closed-circuit TV cameras.

For example, as you are herded through one of the numerous queues, there are Heathrow employees whose whole job seems to be to yell at the crowd and tell them to dispose of “any liquid of more than 100 milliliters.” This provided endless entertainment as the incoming horde of tourists tried to dispose of all the small bottles of wine they had smuggled from their flights - some by simply chugging them in line.

I was patted down at the security checkpoint by a jocular BAA man (the British equivalent of TSA). When I handed my reporters notebook over to him, he opened it up and pretended to write, saying, “Oy, news. What’s the news today? Took a flight. Landed in Heathrow. Got frisked by security.” He even laughed when I told him he had gentle hands.

The charmingly authoritarian mood at Heathrow stood in stark contrast to the Prague airport, where the bored police woman looked over my passport for all of half a second before waving me into the country. No questions.

* Oddly enough, the real Prague airport is nothing like that video. If anything, Heathrow was ten times more likely to induce an existential crisis.