When I was at school in the 1970s, some of the richer kids would come back from their summer holidays with jaw-dropping tales about the wondrous places they had visited. Chief among them, as I remember, was Schiphol airport. ‘It was amazing,’ they would say. ‘There were shops and restaurants and stuff,’ and you could buy a Walkman for some insanely low price.
A few others vainly tried to trump the Schiphol crowd by fancifully claiming to have been to Frankfurt airport and seen an actual sex shop there — an assertion widely disbelieved, certainly by me, until I used the airport 15 years later and discovered it was perfectly true. (At the time the shop was called Dr Müller’s — Germans being the kind of people who like to buy sex toys from someone with suitable qualifications.)
For every trend, a counter-trend is waiting in the wings
Later on, the mantle for ‘amazing airports I have visited’ passed from Schiphol to Dubai and then Singapore.
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