The first day of my trip to Denmark is winding down (actually it's 5:45pm but I haven't slept in what seems like days) and I figured a good topic for today's rant is all the different types of people that make travelling obnoxious. Be it air, land or sea (but not really sea cause you know how I feel about water) there are always people there to make the trip more painful. Sometimes they do it because they think they are more important, sometimes they have no idea they are being annoying at all. Either way, they are doing something that makes me want to shake them like a baby that wont stop crying until they stop crying foreeeever. Here are a few examples from yesterday and today:

Exhibit A

I was standing in the security line at PDX inching closer and closer to having my bag glanced at by an "expert" to assure that no bottle of nail polish makes its way aboard without being safely contained in a sandwich bag, when I felt a lady behind me start encroaching on what would be my blind spot if I was a car (a fucking sweet car). She ever so obviously starts taking two steps forward for every one that I take. At first I thought maybe she's some sort of European and doesn't understand that she's IN MY FUCKING PERSONAL SPACE. Seriously, don't approach me that way or I am going to accidentally start throwing 'bows as I was trained to do by 15 years of soccer. After a minute I realize she's not trying to spoon me standing up, but she's instead trying to move past me to take her place in front of me in the line. Keep in mind that this is occurring as we stand in a single file line formed between a maze of stanchions barely wide enough to corral her gigantic ass (see my last post). Being the passive aggressive person that I am (read: pussy) I didn't say anything. Instead I just took a wider stance and started pretending looking around while swinging my backpack like a death mace ready to level anyone who gets in the way. But seriously. What is your game plan? Casually sneak one person ahead in line saving you all of ZERO minutes? You're gonna get stuck next to the fat 13-year-old on a trip for the first time making sure she announces every 10 seconds where she's going (Canada) but can't be bothered to pay attention well enough to remember to put her bag on the scanner before walking through the metal detector. Seriously, she was there too. With knee-high converse sneakers, jorts, and a BP tank top.

Exhibit B

On my flight between Washington DC and Copenhagen, it was a pretty standard long flight itinerary. Snack and drink, dinner, shut off all the lights so people pass out, wake them up for breakfast (I use that term loosely) then try to get the Asian lady to understand she can't use the bathroom right now cause the plan is approaching the ground at 600 miles per hour. The only thing missing was the shit show of passing out and explaining the customs forms. Side note: I didn't go through customs once. I just went through immigration at Copenhagen, then got my bag (singular) at Aarhus and walked out. Anyway.... Just as the lights in the cabin were turned off, the guy in front of me leans his seat back to fall asleep. Taking the severely diminished space as a cue, I follow suit. Just as I put my headphones in and think to myself "this angle isn't all that bad, I might actually be able to fall asleep" (I'm not kidding I literally was thinking this), I feel a tap on my shoulder. It's the woman behind me and she has a simple request for me. At least that's what I thought it was since she was using her obviously forced "nice face". She goes "I need you to move your seat back up a little, I don't have any room back here". Um... that sounds an awful lot like a demand, which I don't take too kindly to. Again, since I'm a huge pussy, I do what she asks and then proceed to try desperately to get comfortable for the next 6 hours. To no avail. I probably got 20 minutes of sleep and none of it was consecutive. It was brief 3 minute periods between falling unconscious and my head slipping off my hand, violently waking me up. What a bitch. Are you planning on doing space-intensive activities during your red-eye flight in the pitch black? How about you either lean your seat back too like most normal people would do, or quit your fucking bitching and buy a seat that's in a nicer section of the airplane. It's not the Ritz-Carlton; it's the fucking economy class of a Scandinavian airline.

Exhibit C

My 25 minute flight between Copenhagen and Aarhus (enough time to watch people try to suck down a free coffee before the descent and burn their mouths off) was full of business men. Like the entire plane save for a few stragglers like me. While we were in the waiting room, waiting patiently and quietly to board our miniature plane, one American businessmen comes strutting into the area, chatting with an Asian businessman. I was only going to comment on how obviously he was trying to appear European with pointy dress shoes, but then I started listening to what he was saying. And by "listening" I mean "failing to escape the verbal assault he was issuing to every human within earshot". It was one of those smaller terminals where we walk on the pavement outside to get to our plane whose stairs were part of the plane and not rolled up to it. That small. There is no need for that volume level. Then he's going on with a pretty spectacular session of vacation spot name-dropping except that he's bragging about how awesome Yellowstone National Park is. Seriously. Since most of the other businessmen in the area were Danish, no one was able to call him out on it. OH MY GOD THE VIEWS ARE UNLIKE ANYTHING YOU'VE EVER SEEN BEFORE. (insert Asian man commenting on how he liked the views in Ireland, an actual vacation spot) NO, NO, YOU DON'T KNOW UNTIL YOU GO THERE. YOU JUST HAVE TO SEE IT TO UNDERSTAND. Um, excuse me? I've seen it. You're laying it on a little thick. I seem to remember a lot of rocks, a couple of elk, and the strong desire to pull the car over just to see how many assholes would pull over after us and try to figure out what we were looking at.

Exhibit D

Since the other three pertained to the traumatic experiences I had flying, I figured I'd give a little shout out to "Danish woman from Bus 3 today" (I'm pretty sure that's her name). Look, I know you can't lock yourself in a hole with your baby until it's of an age at which it understands the phrase "shut your fucking mouth or I will shut it for you", but all I'm looking for is a little acknowledgement of the fact that your baby is yelling. Not crying, but that really loud "AH! BAH! AAAH!" they do over and over again until your ears start bleeding. Yelling. Shove a pacifier in its face or at least look around at the other passengers on the bus with some sort of apologetic eyebrow wrinkle instead of staring out the window and pretending it's not happening because next time, you won't notice until later that I've switched your baby for a sack of flour and while you're staring at it trying to figure out what happened, your real baby will be floating face down in one of the rivers headed out to sea.

Well that about sums it up. It's about 6:30 and I'm seriously considering going to bed. I wanted to stay up as late as possible so that my sleep schedule isn't too messed up tomorrow but I'm just not gonna make it.