L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

12 September 2007 Blog Home : September 2007 : Permalink

Six Years On

I spent the afternoon and evening of September 11 in Schipol airport along with a few thousand other people, it was intereesting to comapre it with September 11, 2001, when I was in Zurich airport heading Japanwards and watching the towers collpase on live TV.

Nothing so exciting occured in Schipol, but the security measures that have been introduced to stop Al Qaeda and its fellow terrorist scumbags did cause us all a certain amount of pain. We bitched about the enormous queue to get through security - it took half an hour even though the line moved relatively fast (having hundreds if not thousands of visitors to a tradeshow all check in at once to go home will do that) and we moaned about the no liquids etc. rules. We've all noticed that one set of people love that rule - the guys who run the shops on the far side of security. And we compared the queues here to the queues in Heathrow, LAX, Frankfurt and other hub airports. At least, we commented, Schipol has some nice bars once you get through security.

In fact the most exciting thing that happened, and the reason why this post is dated Sept 12, is that our plane had a dent in the side and so they decided to move us to a different one halfway across the airport after we had all boarded it. This delayed the plane sufficiently that I got home about midnight and had no appetite for switching the computer on and sending this post.

The only other event of note occured two hundred Km south or so where the Brussels police decided to arrest the leaders of the Vlaams Belang and others who wished to protest against the creeping Islamization of Europe (and particularly Brussels itself).