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Upon arrival in Kinshasa, DR Congo, the first site for visitors in N'Djili Airport, which is definitely not the most pleasant of sites. It's rundown. It's smelly. It's crowded and it is overall a complete zoo.       Previous to visiting Congo, I read up a great deal on the country and this airport was one of my biggest fears. The endless delays in getting through it, the possbility of losing a great deal from your luggage when going through "customs", and then trying to get away from the airport and in to the center of Kinshas were all daunting problems not allowing me to sleep on the seven hour leg of the flight from Paris to Kinshasa.       Once we got there, my fears weren't fully lived up to. They have apparently cleaned up the airport a great deal in recent years and the need to have a "control" to usher you through the airport has lessened. It still sucks though and there are what I consider to be the five levels of purgatory before you are actually released upong Kinshasa.       1. Passport Inspection This is pretty minor and is just checking to see if you have a visa. The line is lengthy and stretches out on to the tarmac as naturally there are no true landing gates for the planes.       2. Passport Control A much longer process. You stand in lines with everyone else as you weed your way through a couple of booths checking each person's allowance to be in the country. This was apparently much faster in the past, but has been slowed down in the last month as the Congolese staff are learning to use some new computers that the EU got them. Once they get used to it, it will most likely speed up. One thing to note here is that no matter how seemingly stupid of a request the police might ask of you, go along with it. They have nothing else to do other than controlling that line and if you feel like giving them shit, they will give it right back. Just be patient and listen to them and respect them.       3. Health Control A minor step to make sure you have your yellow fever vaccination and your immunization card, which if your traveling here, you should most definitely have had.       4. Luggage... Sweet jesus almighty. This is the worst part. You stand along the luggage conveyor for something like two hours or more waiting for your baggage to come out. This may seem like a boring wait, except that there is no air conditioning in the space and there are all these random guys who want to "help" you grab your bags for a tip. It's sweaty and completely not fun, but is part of this journey. The biggest issue here is if you bag was lost, like one of ours was in the tight transfer in Paris. You don't find out that the bag is gone until the very end of all of this and then once you know, you have to register it as lost and then wait until the next flight, of which there are only three a week. Of course you have to get in a circular line (also known as a mobbing) to get in there to register your lost luggage.       5. Clearance and Onward Once you have your luggage, ignore every single person outside the airport. They will forcefully try to grab your bags to again "help" you carry them for a tip. Just cling on to them and keep going for either your ride, the taxis, or if you're lucky enough, the UN shuttle to the center. It should be noted that the taxis will be $50+ to get in to the center. Why? Because it's an hour ride on some of the worst roads ever conceived.       But that's it. Just a few simple steps. Just a few minor hours and you'll soon be in Kinshasa, home to 10 million people and a whole lot more craziness that I'll get in to again when I can get at the internet, which is scarce commodity in these parts.

Yes, that's right, Madrid has fired a warning shot across the bow of the design world in Spain. Their aim was pointed squarely in the direction of Barcelona, Spain's design center. It's just that this attempt comes somewhere around two decades two late.       This all boils down to the new Terminal 4 and I suppose the number one issue I have with the new terminal (which is the newest and most heavily designed of the four) is that is was just done so that Madrid could thumb their noses at the rest of Spain and dance around singing, "Neener, neener, neener. We're the capital. Ha, ha, ha-ha, ha." Definitely not the best approach for a country dealing with extremely strong and prevalent secessionist groups.       So, instead of spreading out the flow of air traffic for intercontinental flights like we do in the US, they decided to force everything to bounce through Madrid when the destination is outside Europe. This isn't to say that if you're flying on British Airways or Air France to or from the US, that you have to go through Madrid to get to Barcelona, but if you're flying on Iberia, you damned well better believe that you're going to touch down at Barajas before getting to continue on. So naturally, this construction is going to be self-fulfilling in that there will indeed be much more air traffic at Barajas than say, Sevilla, Granada, or Barcelona because of the mandate to force more traffic to go through there. Such is the thinking in Madrid. And such is the reason that an ETA terrorist blew up a massive chunk of this new terminal in December of 2006. These things don't make people happy.       Looking past the political ramifications of this terminal, there is the fact that it sucks. The design is not something I care for on an artistic level, but that's a completely subjective thing. The biggest problem is that it's pointless and doesn't work. For instance:       What the hell are those big exhaust pipe looking things on the floor? Will they reheat my tea that grew cold from the lengthy ride on the Metro to the airport?       Why are the trash cans only 30 cm deep (a foot for metric-so-scary-land)?       Why is it that when people walk through a door that is clearly marked for those arriving to pass through that an alarm goes off at irregular intervals?       Why can people not figure out how to open the bathroom door to leave?       Why is it that when there is the least bit unfriendly weather (heavy rain in this instance) that they have to only run one of their two runways? SFO runs every damned runway even when there's fog.       And most importantly, how is it in a building that isn't even two years old, the ceiling leaks like a sieve when is rains?       It's for these and a number of other reasons that I vote this 21st century construct a massive failure, despite the fact it won the Stirling Prize; a prize that obviously weights federal masturbation higher than passenger usability. If it doesn't I'm at a loss for why this catastrophe won an award other than the fact it built wavy ceilings to scale never before imagined possible. It's crazy that on so many level, it's actually less usable than LAX despite all the money that went in to this gigantic potato chip.

Call me crazy, but from arrival to departure, I was less than amazed with my first encounter of Los Angeles International Airport. Amazingly, with the amount of traveling I do, I've never flown through LAX and apparently, I was missing little and gaining a great deal by flying out of SFO.       LAX is just old. It feels like it was built in the 1960's (1961 according to Wikipedia) and has never since been remodeled or even really cared for. I experienced two fronts of it, arriving in a domestic terminal and departing from an international terminal. I have yet to really understand how this slab of concrete moves nearly 62 million people a year through it while a place like SFO moves only about half that (37 million) yet feels a lot more like a proper airport.       Things that made the airport feel paltry to me were:       - Trash and uncleaned floors in many places       - Schedules shown in housings from the 70's       - The really crappy bus system to get between terminals which is seriously unneeded       - Bathrooms that feel like they're about 20 years past a remodel (I mean, no auto-flush? I'm not a germophobe, but come on!)       - Ghetto maintenance, such as a row of tiles that were knocked out in a restroom that left a gaping hole in to the interior of the wall, which look like they're been that way for years.       Then of course there is the staff. While I've never been a fan of airport staff, those at LAX appeared to be some of the worst. They are not friendly at best. I saw two French women in front of me when going through security who didn't understand that they needed their boarding pass instead of the piece of paper that they were presenting. The woman at the gate just kept yelling at them in English to get our their boarding pass. We have an international "gateway" here and the staff don't know how to ask for basic things in any other language than English, which I might add is not the official language of the US no matter what any hick thinks.       Unfortunately, I have to fly back in to LAX in about two months, which I pray will go well despite all the ug that is LAX. From this point forward, I'm going to make every effort to fly from SFO and avoid the funktastic dip to the south, even if it costs me a bit more money.