While on the way to the airport the driver got in a fight with a couple in an Audi. The man in the Audi rolled down his window and told the driver off and then the driver in turn caught up and passed the Audi with the window down yelling "now f* you" in a Pakistani accent with his finger out the window.
The Aer Lingus check-in at JFK was rather long and my backpack barely made the 50lbs weight limit. At the ticket counter I was told that there was a change of planes in Shannon and that I would not get a separate ticket for that and I would have to just follow everyone else and change planes The security line was even longer and slower. A recent study found the TSA the most hated public institution, more hated than the IRS. The line was kept lively by the TSA manager who told everybody in his hard-boild New York accent to have their passports out with their boarding passes or face spending some time with him, which he assured us we did not want to do.
The airport bar at the gate was an irish-themed pub, I was going to order an hamburger but I found out that they don't actually grill them so I couldn't get one rare so I had a pizza with a Harp Beer.
The Air Lingus flight was on an Aerobus A330-300, one of 6 they are currently opperating. It probably hadden't been refitted since it was built, because it had drop-down CRT monitors rather than the behind the seat flat panels that have been the industry norm for the past decade. The services and the meal offered was a bit austere but nevertheless better than Southwest.
When we reached Shannon we went inside their terminal and its plush red carpets and older furniture reminded me nostalgically of the airports before the days of the sterile grey-white-black polished-tile-floors and blank-white-walled airport interior design of today. The Shannon Stopover is sort of relic of protectionist economics and unintended consequences that is being phased out. It was originally built as a legitmately needed refueling station for transatlantic flights before the Jet Age, when it lost its reason d'etre it became a dinosaur and an inconvience but a political football with a powerfull lobby behind it. As Ireland's economy grew so did the demand and the political support for direct flights to Dublin, but Aer Lingus, formerly the state airline, started phasing it out only in 2006, 41 years after they started conversion to jet aircraft and concurrent with the flotation of over half of the company on the stock market (the state still owns 28% and the employees own 15%)
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