The new face of Budapest Airport

I have not flown from Budapest Terminal 2 for some months and this was the first time that I passed through there in quite a while. I checked in at 2A which did not show any change. The three clocks on the board were showing three different times, none of them right. This is actually not a minor problem because some people, like myself, do not carry a watch and rely entirely on public clocks. In this case, for a moment I was foolled by one of them as I frantically tried to understand why I was missing the plane. A few months ago I passed through Moscow Sheremetievo Airport and there all the clocks in the terminal were showing 12 o'clock midnight. But at least you could see that they were not working. Here in Budapest, you realized this first by not understanding what was going on, then by noticing that the three of them were completely out of sync.

Going through security was as usual, except that a young security guard decided that I was hiding something and took his time trying to find that something in the folds of my clothes and inside my shoes. I had plenty of time so that was no concern, but repeated frisking from different angles was still unpleasant.

Inside the terminal was completely different. Brand new, like another airport somewhere not here. Just like in terminals in London or Frankfurt, now there was a shiny new luxury car on display, presumably to be won by the never-to-come-around lucky guy. Then there were a number of restaurants on the upper floor, some of them serving decent food.

To show that the change has come fast and not everything might be in place yet, some of the electric sockets into which I plugged my laptop did not have electricity. Others were still unfinished, with wires sticking out of them.

At a tiny casino in the duty free shop some Serbian teenage athlets in sports uniform were playing roulette. Now considering that they were only about 15, this might not be the perfect crowd to exploit for a licenced gambling establishment.