How To Fight Boredom In Airports

How To Fight Boredom In Airports
Photo credit: Flickr / bhollar

 

Every traveller must encounter an airport at some point, for Aussies/Kiwis/Japanese and a few other island nations around the world; you have to go to airport to leave the country.

But as every traveller knows, airports are very boring. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can move on and find ways to make them less boring.

If this is your first airport, say goodbye to the family/friends and go through customs nicely, read How To Deal With Customs (which will be uploaded on Friday) for tips to how to avoid not making it through, and head into the big waiting area.

You are now in the waiting area either for your first plane, or the next one. About two seconds will pass and then you will no doubt feel the creeping feeling of boredom invade your mind.

Unless you like shopping, if that’s true than you really don’t need to read this guide, you are totally set. You could watch all the planes take off, but if you are a nervous flyer  then watching the planes take off will only make it a lot worse.

So how do you deal with the boredom that is slowly overtaking your mind?

Go exploring

This may only last for ten minutes if you are in a really small airport, but it gets your legs moving and you want to keep as active as you can until you have to sit down on that plane in those stupid little seats for hours at a time.

Find Food

You may not be hungry now, but you will be after you see the disgusting meal that you have as your only nutrition when on the plane. Get sugar, it will hype you up and everything will seem a lot more funny and less boring.

Sneak Into An Airport Lounge

You’ve forget your card or I thought this was the bathroom are two good excuses to use to get into an airport lounge, as long as you put on the I’m A Stupid Idiot face. Or maybe the person in front of you mistakenly thinks that you are one of them, and they end up holding the door open for you.

You may not be totally successful and end up being kicked out, but hey, at least it will eat up some time. Just be very careful with this, you don’t actually want to get kicked out of the airport itself.

You have simply walked into the wrong room if you get questioned about it; and if in real trouble, turn on the waterworks or the idiot look.

Talk to Someone

If your gate is open and there are a bunch of people waiting around already, strike up a conversation with one of them. Or annoy them, either one should keep your mind off how long it still is before you even get on the plane.

Buy a deck of cards.

I got mine in my very first airport and they have followed me all around the world since. The fold down tray in the planes are a little too small to play a really good game of solitaire, but you can make do.

When sitting in the waiting lounge you can play a good game though, you just have to set it up on the chair while you sit on the ground. Or you could even invite the people around you to play poker or something. It’s a good way to break the ice and playing blackjack is always a fun game or if you really want to get to know people real fast and cure the boredom, play snap.

Or extreme snap, which is something that my brother and I invented in a particularly boring airport. Basic rules of snap still apply, except when you see a snap, you may be the first one to plonk your hand on it, it doesn’t mean those cards are yours. The other players are all allowed to try and snatch them from you. Which means the entire time the game is running you can be trying to snap, hold onto the cards in your hands and trying to grab the other players cards as well.

Probably not a good idea to play extreme snap with people you just met, but if you have travel buddies with you than extreme snap is always a good idea.

Play hide and seek

It’s totally childish, but it really is a lot of fun. Works best if you have a few travel buddies with you or have the ability to get complete strangers to join in, but when you manage it, it eats up a lot of time. Especially if you play it in Singapore Changi Airport – that place is huge and searching all over the place you could never find your travel buddy.

Make sure to have a time limit however, as you could end up missing your flight, and that is never a good idea.

Also if you find yourself alone you could always play hide and seek with the people around you, they don’t even have to know you are playing a game with them as you constantly duck around and away from them.

Find a bench

Having exhausted all the above methods if you are still bored and still have a long time to go, maybe now is a good time to curl up on a bench somewhere and watch TV.

Not all of the airports have TV, but most do, and if no one is looking you can change the channel and curl up and watch your final bit of TV for awhile.

Surf the web

In a brilliant move by the airports, a lot of the transit terminals in the airports have free Internet, doted all around. Even though they tell you only to jump on for fifteen minutes at a time if you have an early flight, or a late one, no one is ever around and you can stay on there until you have to go to your gate.

 

Hopefully by now you are either not at all bored, playing hide and seek or extreme snap with a bunch of strangers, cruising the net or are currently bugging someone, or even better are now waiting in line to board the plane.

Well done, I hope these have kept your occupied, though I have to ask, what are some of the ways you have kept from being totally bored in an airport?

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