New York’s JFK vs. Frankfurt Airport
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 08.17.07 | 8:29 AM ET
Thomas Swick recently flew home from Europe, passing through Frankfurt airport and New York City’s John F. Kennedy International. According to Swick, they couldn’t have been more different. In Frankfurt’s airport, he encountered an inviting rustic tavern, walked among large windows looking out onto sun-lit planes and watched an international crowd of travelers passing Hermes, Boss and Swarovski and chatting in the Goethe Bar, near a statue of the writer. And it was only 7 a.m. “I had never seen such a wide-awake airport at such an early hour,” he writes. “It felt as if the world had left home.” And what of JFK, where Swick landed nine hours later?
“I walked on soiled carpets under a water-stained ceiling past rows of torn seats showing yellow foam padding,” he writes. “This was the anti-gemutlichkeit: bad lighting, bad paperbacks, bad music (Everyday People), bad food.”
Suffice to say, it was not the homecoming Swick would have hoped for.
“It was,” he writes, “disheartening…to come from what a former Defense Secretary not long ago called ‘Old Europe’ and find everything—in the so-called ‘greatest city in the world,’ in the superpowerful United States—tired and sad and dilapidated.”
Swick’s column is yet more bad press for JFK.
Related on World Hum:
* What Happens at JFK Doesn’t Stay at JFK
* JetBlue Apologizes for Stranding Passengers on Planes at JFK
* Adventures in ‘Airworld’
Photo by scarymonkeyshow via Flickr, (Creative Commons)