delta

Our time in Georgia was air-conditioned from beginning to end. Atlanta is just an airport, albeit the busiest. It is also a city, but the airport came first. The plan of the building is unavoidably diagrammatic; it has no scale, no reference other than a plane, a runway, all of which are in any case arbitrary benchmarks - the Airbus 440 that we saw from the windows of the waiting area looked impossible in itself, dwarfing the transatlantic Boeings. I looked at the map, a long spine from which dozens of arms spread, drawings of planes suckling on each one; some questions arose - does the Airbus make the airport bigger or smaller? What colour is the building? Can you walk from the airport to the city centre? - None of these questions are worth asking though. Those that spend the most amount of time there don’t even think about it – the runway staff, the airport police (on segways), the pilots and everybody else just get on with things, and a new reality is created. It is a place where 90% of commuters don’t see the building as we know the term, sucked as they are from a plane through customs to another plane, and none of these people, none of them, care. This is the new built environment, and when it is normalised, we will call other things strange.

The most alarming thing in the airport was the number of soldiers, marines, all heading to or returning from war. There seemed to be thousands of them; tight-knit groups of mostly teenagers, staring intently ahead of them, receiving solemn glances from other people. I couldn’t tell who was coming or going. All of them in grey fatigues, marked with a name badge and a flag. We all sat together in the food hall waiting for an aeroplane to take us away; there was nothing else to do.

The flight to Buenos Aires was good. We arrived early and I was looking forward to talking to people; we asked about getting into the city – it is 46km from the airport, and there were taxis which cost 118 pesos or buses which cost 1 peso, but you need change for the bus, so I had to find change, all I had was 100 peso notes and nobody will give you change of a hundred, nobody will even sell you anything for a hundred pesos. I would later find out that the lack of coins was a side-effect of the devalued currency after the economic collapse – coins were rare because people were taking them across the border to Bolivia and melting them. When Duhalde defaulted on Argentinean loans and abandoned the peso-dollar parity in Jan 2002 the currency lost so much strength that the metal of the coins became more valuable than their face value. It is still done, and change is still a problem but it’s becoming less profitable now, and it is hoped that soon it won't be worth the hassle. I finally got change from a bank in the terminal and we were on our way.