“A few years ago, one of my friends had the idea for living a whole month in an international airport, without ever leaving it (unless, all international airports being by definition identical, to catch a plane to another international airport). To my knowledge, he has never realized this project, but its hard to see what, objectively, there might be to prevent him.”

“The activities essential to life, and most social activities, can be carried out without difficulty within the confines of an international airport: there are deep comfortable armchairs and bench seats that aren’t too uncomfortable, and often restrooms even, in which passengers in transit can take a nap. You’ve got toilets, baths and showers, and often saunas and Turkish baths. You’ve got hairdressers, pedicurists, nurses, masseurs and physiotherapists, bootblacks, dry cleaners who are equally happy to mend heels and duplicate keys, watchmakers and opticians. You’ve got restaurants, bars and cafeterias, leather shops and perfumaries, florists, bookshops, record shops, tobacconists and sweet shops, shops selling pens and photographers. You’ve got food shops, cinemas, a post office, flying secretarial services and, naturally, a whole host of banks (since it’s impossible, in this day and age, to live without having dealings with a bank).

The interest in such an undertaking would lie above all in its exoticism: a displacement, more apparent than real, of our habits and rythms, and minor problems of adaptation. It would soon become tedious no doubt. All told,it would be too easy and, as a consequence, not very testing. Seen in this light, an airport is no more than a sort of shopping mall, a simulated urban neighbourhood. Give or take a few things, it offers the same benefits as a hotel. So we could hardly draw any practicle conclusion from such an undertaking, by way of either subversion or acclimatization. At most, we might use it as the subject-matter for a piece of reportage, or as the point of departurefor an umpteenth comic screenplay.”

(From Espèces d’espaces, Georges Perec, 1974)

Something tells me that I am either going to be seeing or living the film during next weekends trip to Cnina.

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