Shot this yesterday evening with my four year old iPhone at the airport in Riga (RIX) just after arriving from Boryspil International in Kyiv (IEV). Once we landed, a rep from Air Baltic firmly but politely instructed me to board the same plane again (above) as soon as I had passed through the rigorous passport, covid, and security checkpoints.

I don’t think that kind of loop has happened to me since a refueling stop in Karachi (Pakistan) several decades ago. I vividly recall a small army of extraordinarily slender Pakistani men wearing dark blue overalls topped with bright red baseball caps, holding a variety of cleaning equipment, stood patiently on a separate platform adjacent to the jet bridge of the PIA jumbojet we were exiting from. I remember thinking that few if any of these young bearded men had ever been in a plane that wasn’t neatly parked on a tarmac.

There couldn’t have been time to clean the cabin yesterday, that’s for sure. Then again, most of my fellow passengers looked like corporate seagulls heading to or from yet another glorious meeting where Powerpoint slide decks were shown and shared ad nauseam. One of them sat next to me and worked on his presentation the entire flight from Kyiv. Everything about him seemed so neat and orderly. Nothing wasn’t carefully mapped out and planned. It was only when he opened his briefcase to put away his notebook before we landed at Kastrup that I noticed total chaos. Which I found in someway found reassuring. He was human, after all.