Round One: ORD vs PEK

The second time I ever flew--I was maybe 11 at the time--my sister and I flew sans parents to my Aunt's house in California. We had to change planes at O'Hare, and this caused my mother no small amount of anxiety. O'Hare was described to me as an almost mythically large airport. It was the sort of place where people get lost looking for their planes, and show up at their gate 30 years later with Rip van Winkle beards asking for their flight to Peking via Constantinople. At the very least, there was a strong chance that we'd miss our connection and then be stuck in Chicago. Probably forever.

In fact, a kind stewardess led us the 100 yards to our gate. In fact, I totally could've gotten us to the gate without her help. I was eleven, after all. And it was only O'Hare. In fact, every time I've been to O'Hare, I've found it pretty easy to get around in. Yes, the alveolar structure gets a bit complicated, but in general you're funneled towards your gate pretty effectively. And sometimes your gate can be pretty far away. But it's not like, say, Detroit 'It's actually a mile long tube' Metro Airport, which trades navigational ease for being insanely long and inefficient. And though people complain about the delays, I don't have the sort of loathing for it that I do for, say, San Francisco Airport, which fails both in the navigability category (To get from one gate to another, I once actually had to go through a door marked "do not enter" and ride a secret shuttle through the baggage area) and in the not-having-my-flight-cancelled-and-getting- me-stuck-there category. Seriously, I've spent like 23 hours of my life waiting for flights in SFO. Which, ok, isn't a lot, but enough to make you start disliking an airport.

Not so for O'Hare. Now, I realize that O'Hare may cause other people some delays. Whatever, man. I live here now, and I remain cautiously optimistic that those delays will never hurt me. You know those annoying signs they sometimes put for new subdivisions on the soundwall by the interstate, the ones that read "If you lived here, you'd be home by now"? That's what living in Chicago is like.


If that wasn't enough, O'Hare has murals. Probably more than two, but there are at least two on the way to the United terminal. Both are wonderfully chaotic. Without bothering to look it up, I'm going to guess that they were actually made by scores of artists, each told to paint what they liked about Chicago without talking to the others. Seriously. Look at it. I've also included the trippy perspective part of one mural that has what I take to be Chicago's chinatown on it. I'm really hoping that PEK has a similar mural of Chicago. I also hope that the Beijing airport Mural has a giant lake monster like the one on the right.

Of course, the downside of O'Hare is that it took E from me today, spiriting her away to Beijing for months and months. If I was a giant reptile, I would consider that cause enough to stomp on the buildings, crushing them in impotent rage. Failing that, I'll have to stay on good terms with O'Hare until December, in the hopes that it will deliver me across the sea to her.