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| - This airport pisses me off.
T1 was built from scratch a decade ago and it has 0% of the vision that brand new airports like Incheon have. The international terminal is a fucking joke. It's an O'Hare or JFK. Only ORD and JFK were built 30-40 years ago. Within that gap of time when design no longer mattered. This is supposedly new. There are no sitting spaces isolated from gates. Terminal-wide announcements regarding every single flight departure are made every five minutes. No couches. Just a giant horrendous duty free/scandanavian department store, a short staffed tim hortons with minimum 20+ people in line at all hours, and pay lounges. Incheon has a transit area where you can rest, check email on one of the free 25 computers (not kiosks, computers), and have a free shower ($3.50 for a towel). Don't get me started on Singapore. Even Narita puts some effort into making international travel comfortable. Toronto could lead and do something like this. But no. Why do something different when mediocrity will do? But to AC's fairness, the MLLs all have showers. But the MLL isn't free.
Every time I go through T1, there is some hapless employee opening or closing or abandoning a secured door, resulting in a very very loud high pitched ringing noise. Sometimes it will even just start doing it on its own. No one does anything. It just goes off for 5 minutes. Then it shuts itself off, or some half baked security "guard" shuts it off by smacking his hand on the alarm. This happens at least once every time I go through this airport. It's like the lil' chocolates they hand out on Swissair. Inevitable. Unavoidable.
Recently they took out fully operational and decent food outlets for "renovation". T1 was built 10 fucking years ago. The pizza place in the domestic hammerhead that had pretty good slices (that were reasonably priced, for an airport) is gone. So is the Thai wok place. It has been replaced with an Opa or Pita Pit or some store selling jam or some bullshit. Oh, and Lush is gone. Great.
This airport is so obsessed with not having franchises, yet all of their food outlets are run by HMSHost. So you're going to get even more uninspired food choices. Finally, they allowed A&W, which means decent fastfood. But, because this is canada, this place can't be like SFO where there is a myriad of choice: some HMS style places, some independent sushi places, some ramen places, etcetc.
CATSA lineups in the evening are awful. They'll close lanes and shift lineups into other lineups. The CATSA people here give even less of a fuck than waitresses in calgary. It's that bad. Screeners have no idea what an "opt out" is. They tell me that I'm not speaking their language.
The CCTVs. They're horrendous. The same ads every 10 minutes. And the vapid news programming of the CBC. The commercials are better than the "programming". I'll tolerate this type of BS in Atlanta because I am not paying a $26 AIF and a $10 navcan and a $15-$25 CATSA charge. But in YYZ I'm paying $26 AIF and a $10 navcan and a $15-$25 CATSA charge. And yet they still need to advertise like this. Because my TV-B-Gone doesn't work on these things, I'll stand on the arm rests of some benches and then rip the power and coaxial cables from the tvs. I also try to wiggle my hand in so I can disconnect all dozen of the additional USB, coaxial, and power cables from the TV. Ma and Pa waiting for their flight to Edmonton and Billy McPherson returning home to Deer Lake think otherwise, but I'm really doing them a favor. I'm an improver.
Like Toronto itself, this airport is so mediocre that they put up billboards bragging about how they are "the most improved large sized airport in the world". I thought only Heathrow would be so insipid as to boast something this. But no. Toronto. Most improved airport. Congratulations. Built a brand new terminal only a few years ago, demolished another one, and yet it still requires "improvement".
This is a soulless, institutional, bureaucratic wasteland. I imagine government employees just feel safe, secure, and happy being in this building. I hate flying through this airport on my way back to Calgary. It depresses the hell out of me. It's even depressing when I'm leaving canada. I try going through US airports, even when transiting, despite the additional lineups and tedious transfer processes. There's just something about YYZ that sucks the soul out of me.
I type this as a security woman is louuudly snoring on the benches beside me. Refer to my uploaded photo. Most improved airport.
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