Fraport

Earlier this week, my wife, daughter and I landed in Frankfurt Airport, owned and operated by Fraport, which is fun to say and looks good on the local soccer team's jersey. If you are a world traveler, chances are, you've been there too. Fraport is sort of an industrial Wonderland maze of stainless steel and colored lights. It somehow feels both unmanageably huge and cramped at the same time, like hidden passages in the Death Star or the layer of a 60's James Bond villain. Can't you picture Bond, pistol in hand, bikinied foreigner by his side, racing through the passages to dismantle some sort of exotic weapon of mass destruction before it's too late?

And yet, in spite of these discomforts, I love it there. There's no other building that awakens my Reiselust in the same way. Fraport is a journeyman engine moving travelers of all kinds, uniting us briefly along the way to Munich, Chicago or Johannesburg. The silver labyrinth somehow produces people of every size, shape and color, every tongue, tribe and nation. Stressed but determined, tired but adventurous, business suits, sweat pants, hijabs, high heels, jeans, cowboy boots, turbans, baseball caps. All of us, regardless of where we come from, united in that we are going somewhere, pulling, pushing and bearing our belongings with expectation.