I believe I truly have found the worst airport in the world. No, it’s not Karachi, or Islamabad, or even the intense security checks of Kabul International Airport. The worst airport in the world is in Toronto Pearson International Airport.
On the way to Canada from Pakistan, I explained to my brother Stephen how I couldn’t understand the baggage carousels in Canada. In Pakistan the luggage comes in on belted conveyors that loop back and forth throughout the room. These, to me, are obviously much lighter and therefore cheaper to run as well. In Canada however, the luggage drops down onto a small carousel with shifting steel pieces, that must cost a fair bit more to run than the light conveyors in Pakistan. To add to this, baggage comes down slowly from the floor above, where it then slides down onto the carousel, not only slamming into the bags below, but sometimes stacking two, if not three bags on top of each other. This means that if your bag happened to land on top of a couple others, you then have to reach as high as you can to fight your bag off a revolving mountain.
Before seeing the baggage carousels, my brother told me that he liked the way they were built in Canada and that he thought they were “cool.” However, after almost an hour and a half of waiting for bags to slowly drop down before we could wrestle them off off one another as they quickly slipped by, and almost pushed him into a railing as they went by, he had converted to my hatred of Canadian carousels.
To add to this, Toronto Pearson International is the only airport I know of where a person has to pay to use the baggage carts that are normally provided for the public. And after paying a whole two dollars to get one, one finds oneself with a pitiful little cart that cannot go backwards, and that needs to have its handle pressed to move at all. As always, I was not impressed. The only time that I found this cart closely useful was when it didn’t roll away from me as I loaded my bags from it into the car in the parking lot. It seems the only thing it does well is to keep from moving.
After using the cart, the thing should then be returned to it’s cart ‘corral’, where usually a person in dealt out twenty-five cents by the machine attached, to make one feel a little better about their financial loss over this awful contraption. Instead, upon returning the poor cart to the ground floor, my brother and I were left empty handed by the machine, two dollars poorer and feeling very much cheated.
So, Toronto Pearson International Airport, it’s official, you are the worst airport in the world.