Damn, we are major geeks. If you find yourself travelling across half the world to attend a gamer convention, you are a serious game-geek. And the two of us are off on a jaunt to Korea to attend Blizzard’s World Wide Invitational.
So far, so good. It’s a long day of travel, but so far, things are going pretty smoothly. We were driven to the airport by an irate Armenian man, who was surprisingly adept at maneuvering the shuttle van in and out of traffic in a way that can only be described as “agile”. And by agile, I of course mean “scary as hell.”
Los Angeles International Airport (affectionately known as LAX) is, in our reasonably well-traveled opinion, among the most unpleasant airports in the world. This is because of the four-step process we like to call “The LAX Experience”. The LAX Experience begins well before you actually arrive at LAX; the first step is actually your efforts to get to the airport. You see, city planners placed LAX right in the middle of the biggest traffic snarl in the entire city. The airport is surrounded by a zone of impenetrable traffic approximately 10 miles thick. There are no shortcuts, or workarounds, or tricks to get you there any faster. You will be sitting in the gigantic near-parking lot we like to call Los Angeles , creeping slowly toward your goal, for hours on end.
By the way, have I mentioned that Los Angeles is already the city deemed “most severely impacted by traffic” in nearly every study over the past decade? It’s true. The whole city is basically a parking lot, with LAX situated right in the middle of the most congested, slowest moving parts of that lot. It’s bad. There is no description that I can offer that can ever really ever capture how ugly the traffic is. Ugly, as in “badly congested” and ugly, as in “the person driving next to you is an unwashed mutant with a face like a hyena”.
