at the frankfurt airport

i spent about 4 hours in frankfurt yesterday, about halfway through my 26 hours of travel from iasi (in northeastern romania) to atlanta (in southeastern america). living in romania, i miss having a wide diversity of race, ethnicity, language. sure, there are people who come to iasi to study medicine from africa and the middle east, and a few other foreigners - but the majority of people are romanian or gypsy, and generally pretty homogeneous. so .. i spent at least an hour of my time just standing and people watching. and then took some time to write down some of my thoughts.

and i saw people from china, japan, korea .. from the middle east .. from india .. from africa .. from northern europe .. and even from america :)

i am pretty sure that i heard german, romanian, english, russian, chinese, arabic, and italian. and those are just the ones that i recognized!

a strange euphony of images --
a nun wearing the clothes of the order mother teresa started, as well as one in regular black habit
a man in a blue striped shirt with a matching blue striped bag
random employees on bicycles
piercing sunlight through the sunroof for a short five minutes
wealthy westerners eating at a fancy restaurant
thirty young africans sitting on the floor waiting hours for their flight
parents with children wandering up and past and around and over and behind and through
beautiful women in indian saris
a sunburned traffic controller with a fluorescent yellow vest
american girls in immodestly short shorts
a man sprinting to catch his plane
the easy coherence of european fashion
english being heard from every race and ethnicity and age