The Philadelphia International Airport

It is my lucky pleasure to spend a lengthy four-hour layover in what I consider one of the worst airports in the country – PHL. Not only is there NO COFFEE (I have literally walked the entirety of the B and A concourses and there is not one coffee shop), but there is NO WIRELESS INTERNET. There is some (extremely unappreciated) irony in my technological isolation in the international concourse, the newest part of the airport.

So I am told to go to concourse B. I definitely didn’t JUST come from concourse B where there apparently is wireless and it for sure did not take me a full 20 minutes to walk to my gate (A26) at the very end of concourse A. But I have four hours to kill so, sure, why not carry all my luggage 20 minutes back to concourse B? Upon arriving at B3, I take my computer out, plug it in (score!) and look for wireless. No luck. I move to B5. It appears as though there is wireless, but nonetheless absolutely no pages will load after minutes of waiting. Let’s try B16. Now probably 25 minutes from my gate (and roughly where I disembarked my flight from Seattle), the wireless page finally loaded. I enter my credit card information since I did not just spend all that time and carry all that weight to not go online. It’s overpriced and at this point I’ll only have about two hours, but whatever. It refuses to read my credit card information. Twice. It’s a sign.

Extremely pleased, I decide to spend my time perusing the “PHL Marketplace” (read: a Sbarro, a gift shop creepily called Wisteria, and Borders). The bookstore actually does lighten my spirits and I decide to buy I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell because it seems like an easy read that might actually get me through my long flight. Why did I not bring any DVDs?

Now I am back at the lonely hole at the end of this godforsaken airport where there is only a McDonalds (possibly the last place I want to go after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma during my SEA-PHL flight). Still 1.5 hours from take-off (assuming, optimistically, that we leave on time) and twelve hours from Malaga.