Thursday, July 2, 2009

Malaga is not icecream

Four times at AGP covering 8 years, and still no idea why this airport has any business of being a part of the Universe. And that's saying something, I do have a lot of respect for rat kings, for example. But not for AGP. In 2002 I preferred to sleep at the beach of Torremolinos among drunk Spanish teenagers, to escape from AGP. At some point in this night a gay couple stripped directly in front of me and started to make out. And I still say that a night at AGP would have been more terrifying. It's that bad.

AGP is essentially a monumental rectangular block called 'Terminal 2' for some reason. They do have a historical and irrelevant Terminal 1 nearby, which can only be found on Google Maps. Consistently confusing, the two gates of Terminal 2 are called B and C. The ground-side of T2 is mainly a monumental, airy departure hall and a arrival hall of unclear nature. The dominating colour is the brown shade from the stuff you sometimes find under your fingernails. I can hardly bring myself to write a single sentence about the air-side, which is boring as hell. The only power outlets are behind a stupid electric rocking horse which pretends to be a car and takes photos when fed money. There, I did it, amazing.

Surrounded is this whole thing by an unholy mess of traffic. The moment you leave the airport you are surrounded with mind-boggling dullness. You stand there for a while, try to get a grip on this spectacle of not even nihilism, and then surrender. This airport has quite obviously been invented long before anything interesting has been invented, including and particularly airport hiking.

This detailed history of the Malaga Airport nicely illustrates what we have suspected all along - shortsightedness rules airport development. This is not necessarily the end of the world. In case of AGP, however, a lack of foresight meets a lack of creativity. This is the combination of inabilities that brought us kick-and-rush football, the Big Bang theory, and the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. Ugly stuff.

AGP is currently under construction. They show a 3D model of the anticipated airport outline in the departure hall, which is a nice idea, because it makes the exploration of this disaster so much more convenient. According to this model, the new airport will look exactly like the old one. And although construction sites are of course intrinsically fascinating, I cannot quite see how the transition from one hopelessness to another identical one merits any attention. Even the tower is kind of mainstream here.