Upon arrival at Faro airport I was greeted with a blast of warm air as I went through the doors. I stopped for a second and lifted my head, considering just stopping there for the hour or so that I had until boarding. I was far from cold after the walk to the terminal, but there was something just comforting about heating and I had had a reasonably stressful morning so far. With two flights and a trip across London still to go that day, a bit of time soaking up the heat seemed fair...
Straight in front of me was a queue. This was difficult to miss as the construction work appeared to have turned the terminal into a giant cardboard box park. Every pillar was surrounded by a (probably plasterboard) box and more 'boxes' nestled against the edges and corners everywhere. Last time I had been in the airport, the departures area (Faro is not big enough to boast such a thing as multiple terminals) was a large hall in the form of an 'L'. This time an odd sort of claustrophobic bigness pervades the area as you can't see two feet in front of you, but all those corners and corridors must go somewhere...
Departures was empty apart from this queue, so I got on the end in the assumption that it must be for my flight. I have not flown by anyone but EasyJet for some time and was not at all sure what the procedure was for posh non-economy flights. I spent some time debating whether to put my Hello Kitty backpack in the hold or not, but I had a connection to make and no idea how that all works. Based on the fact that I was only staying one night and if they lost the bag, or transferred it to Timbuktu, I would be home again probably before they even found it, I decided to keep hold of it.
Soon I was through to the departure lounge. I had a window seat and was quite excited about being childfree and flying by day. I was on seat 21A and imagine my delight when I finally sat down to discover that I was staring out over the wing. My trip was therefore spent craning forward to see as much as possible in front of the wing, or twisting backward to look out of the window behind me. Another flight might not have been worth the effort but I always find flying over Portugal enthralling. As we left the ground I was struck, as always by the beauty and the character of my adopted homeland.
Faro is the biggest metropolitan area in the Algarve, and the administrational hub. It is the district capital of an area that covers 5000km² with over 450,000 inhabitants and 10 million tourists visiting every year. The population is 47,000, roughly equal to Inverness, Scotland. As I looked down upon it I was fooled for a second by the marina. The marina and the boats are a significant part of the town centre and it looks like it's quite a size before you remember that the boats in it are all fishing boats and dinghys. The marina is accessed by going under the railway line so only the small stuff can get in.
We were quite low as we flew over Olhão, another fair size town by Algarvean standards. The tiny white chips of houses cluster together, looking rather like God dropped the chalk when he was designing the land and it shattered, leaving crumbled debris and a smudge of chalk dust. Further up and further in the ripples start in the landscape. We don't have anything quite as grand as a real, rocky mountain down in the Algarve, the highest point is a mere 900m, just about poking through the southernmost clouds, but the land just kind of crumples up, culminating in a modest ridge across the northern border, separating us from the vast empty flatlands of the Alentejo. The picture that comes to my mind is of a silk scarf, carelessly dropped to the floor and falling in mini peaks and troughs until it flattens out at either end. The hills look smooth enough to stroke from my lofty vantage point.
Now we were high up and moving fast. I spent my time marveling at the 'baragens', the huge (by Portuguese standards, anyway) dams built across the rivers to water a growing population. My eye would follow a snake of blackish blue along until suddenly it got wider, as if a bit had got cut out when turning the page from one map to the next. The smooth ribbon becomes a monster with fingers probing and prodding the hills around it. Squat and wide, long and twisty, they sit over the landscape like a fungus, swallowing up roads and villages and making fan shapes like coral under a blue sea of sky. We finally made it to a snowy topped mountain range which research tells me was probably the French/Spanish border. After that the clouds took over and I saw no more until the Netherlands.
Wow, how different that was to the scruffy Iberian penisula. The land stretched uniformly to the sea with no natural boundaries in sight. Neat, straight roads ran to tidy towns. At the coast the land just ended in sea, making me wonder what makes the sea stop? In all that flatness it is hard to imagine that the river mouths and the ocean itself are more than 3 feet deep. The land looks somewhat like a cake baked in the oven, risen, leaving slight irregularities in height and shape, then carefully sliced just above the top of the tin to create a smooth plane on which to place the icing. I felt untidy just looking at it.
Amsterdam loomed, neatly, on the horizon. My excitement grew as we neared landing. Soon I would be in the Netherlands! I zipped up my bag and expectantly waited for the doors to open. And waited. And waited some more. It had just got to the point where I was wondering if we had actually landed at the wrong airport and were simply driving over to the next one when we finally started slowing down. I disembarked without drama and arrived in the airside lounge at Amsterdam Schipol. I was pretty hungry by now and set out to find a sandwich.
Eventually I gave up. There were a lot of beautiful shops, all neatly named for what they were selling. There was a 'Toys' shop, a 'Souvenirs' shop, an 'Electronics' shop, you get the picture. For this country gal from the very end of the known world, it was a bit of a culture shock. I browsed the toy shop (a lot, no, a LOT, of Miffy in various guises) and the electronics shop, in which there were bargain bins full of carelessly chucked boxes with (I'm sorry, I have to say it) neat signage advertising 'two for €49!'. My idea of a bargain bin is the eight square acres or seemingly so that the local supermarket dedicates to crates stacked in huge islands flagged '1€', 2€', right up to 10€ in the far distance. What I could not find (apart from change from a twenty) was anything useful to eat.
You may remember that I am on a diet. Being that I was on my way to a convention revolving around this diet, I thought I had better make a fair shot at sticking to it whilst away. Unfortunately, apart from a food hall taking up the entire upper floor, there was nothing for me to eat. The 'Food' shop boasted racks of cheeses, shelves of caviar, fridges full of carapaccio cod, smoked eel and deli sausage slices. All looking rather delicious, but the few things that I could actually eat without regretting it were out of my price range. I had two extra rolls stashed in my case that I had bought at Faro and I had been hoping to find something to stick in them, but the best compromise that I could find between expense and fat content was beef jerky. I would have been quite pleased about this, only the packet appeared to have five potato chip sized slices in. For +3€. I almost made it to the till with it, when I decided that I could just get a sandwich upstairs.
This is not the easy job you would think, as I need something with a low fat filling such as ham. No sausage, egg or cheese. No tuna, chicken or seafood as it will inevitably come swimming in mayonnaise. No butter. No wholemeal bread. As it happened, I didn't get as far as looking too hard, as the signs above the baguettes wanted +6€ for one and the meals at Burger King were all at least 8€. I can get dinner out for that at home. In the end, I was so fed up with it all that I decided I wasn't that hungry anyway and I would go do the crossword puzzle. An hour remained until I could board the next 'plane.
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