Urban airport camping

My day started yesterday at 4 pm and stretched out and out through an extra 7 hours of time change backwards and oozed into the little holes on the long benches of the Accra arrivals area.  I tossed and turned for a while, hoping the holes wouldn’t be permanently imprinted on my hip, and wondered at the intensity of the animatedly loud and heated conversation of the 20 people apparently upset at the vending machine to my right.  On the next bench over, an airline worker is stretched out napping, with his bright yellow neon and retro-reflective vest crumpled over his chest.  Another conversation at the bottom of my bench seems to inspire a lot of gesticulating and bench-banging, and my I-pod music is almost completely drowned out despite the headphones as my makeshift bed rattles and shakes with the conversation’s punctuation.

My amazing campsite, complete with bedding

For reasons that all seemed very good and logical at the time, I’ll be spending the better part of a day in the Ghana airport.  And by better, I mean pretty much all.  The movie The Terminal has never been a completely far-fetched oddity for me – I have lived it in pieces, over and over again, sleeping on benches and floors and wandering in shops and washing my hair in the bathroom sink at 3 am when the whole airport belongs to me.  Although I have to say, a 23-hour layover is one of the longest I can claim to date.  It’s only been 5 hours so far, and already I’ve met an amazing amount of people, from the friendly Egyptian engineer behind me in the looooong immigration line, to one of our Togolese translators who came over to say hi when he simultaneously recognized me and my flamboyantly orange Mercy Ships water-bottle, to a little brown girl who shyly wandered over when I forgot I was in West Africa and waved at her.   Here, a side-to-side wave means a friendly hello, while a down-wards wave means “come here.”  Just as I was starting to get back into Indonesian mannerisms…time to remember the African ones again!

All in all – it may shape up to be a relatively comfortable layover.  After all, the benches don’t have intermittent armrests, so far no one is smoking indoors, and the baggage people thoughtfully agreed to keep my checked bag (although it could have made a very comfy pillow).  The only main problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a bathroom in this particular part of the airport.  Maybe I’ll walk over to Departures to find one…just in case I need to wash my hair tonight.