Airport Reviews: Adolfo Suarez Madrid-Barajas Terminal 4

When the popular podcast Pardon My Take first launched, Big Cat and PFT Commenter promised us many things. Among them were Cult Week and Airport Reviews. Well, all us Award Winning Listeners have basically already joined a cult, but the Airport Reviews still have yet to happen. 

As you may have read on any of my recent posts, I am abroad for the semester nbd. I feel that gives me a chance to take Airport Reviews international/actually start them. 

I've already flown into London Heathrow once, soon to be twice as I type this, and I have flown out of London Gatwick into Barcelona El Prat. I can't go into too much detail since those were a while ago, but based on pure memory I can score them. Heathrow I am going to put off since I may be flying into there (and out at least at the end of the semester) multiple times. I know I'll be back there, basically, and want to give it a cumulative score. London Gatwick I will give a C+. Not too much really going on, security was kinda weird, but they had free WiFi. Barcelona El Prat, it stinks. STINKS. To make a long story short, I spent almost an hour trying to find the currency exchange so I could take a cab to my buddy's apartment. Turns out they don't advertise it too well. It was in this corner and was just a bank with little signage to even tell you it was a bank, let alone they did currency exchange there. 

So now we got to the present. I am currently sitting in a McDonalds at the airport in Madrid as I have been since roughly 8 o'clock. You see, I was planning my spring break and found myself in a conundrum. I was staying with my buddy in Barcelona from Friday to Thursday. We were going to go somewhere else in Europe at that point, but he told me a week out that his school was taking them to Valencia further down the Spanish east coast for the weekend. So I booked a hotel in (read: on the outskirts of, HUGE jimbo) Madrid. Being the frugal college student I am, I thought to myself, "Hey, my flight out is Sunday at 655 AM, why don't I just do two night in madrid and Saturday I can carry all my shit through the city and then make me way over to the airport at 8 pm and stay overnight until I can go through security and board!" I have yet to decide if this was, in fact, bad and not good. 

But how is it so far? Well, I will make a few updates in real time.

11:11 PM (Make A Wish, bitcc)-WiFi is free and unlimited (would be REAL asshole-ish to cut us off). A little slow at times, but bearable in the least. There's a ton of people in this McDonalds, and the aromas have actually been fairly effective at keeping me up so I don't doze off and get everything stolen, likely by the homeless guy who told me he lives in the terminal and I gave 5 cents to (this is my one good deed of the year). I also watched this cute Spanish girls luggage while she went and ordered some nugs, but my game in Spanish is worse than my game in English as I learned in Barcelona. Shocking, I know. Probably gonna have to get up and get some food and walk around for bit soon so my legs don't fall off. 

1:42 AM-I've been here for almost 6 hours and I may be reaching my breaking point. I swear if I get stuck next to a fat person on this flight and am unable to sleep I will do absolutely nothing. Also I have a middle seat so I'm SOL. I did get a Big Mac, Fries and soda from McDonalds though. i had been holding out until I was super hungry in the hopes it would then carry me over until I least got through security and could see what sort of breakfast options there were near my gate. Looks like I'll be getting another Big Mac meal plus a McPollo (McChicken, for you non-Spanish speakers), and then getting breakfast at like 5 AM. My ass hurts from the poor cushioning, I am trying my hardest to not fall asleep so my stuff doesn't get stolen, but I did witness some dude city at an unattended McDonalds meal, eat a few fries, look around and then put his coat in front of the meal while he shoveled it into his laptop bag. That alone may make this whole thing worth it. Just an incredible event to witness with my own two eyes. 

3:39 AM-Alright this airport is starting to get old. The WiFi cut out. I just want it to start working again and for security to open up so I can go look at something that I haven't seen for almost 8 straight hours. Rest assured, this prolonged experience will not have an effect on my rating. I will base it solely on what I would have considered a normal amount of time waiting in a McDonalds in a Madrid airport.

5:00 AM-Got through security without understanding a single thing being said to me, a few points off there for not adjusting to me as an ugly American. Departures area is pretty nice but as I type people are just starting to flow in in small numbers. Nothing is open besides the second 24-hour McDonald's that I do not want to order form. Hoping shit either opens soon or theres stuff near my actual departure gate. It's a waiting game, folks. Oh, and the WiFi still isn't working for me. So that's bad.
UPDATE-Fixed the WiFi issue. We byke.

5:51 AM-I'm sitting at the gate waiting for boarding to start in like 20 minutes. Not much around us besides a few vending machines.

I think this is a good time to I've my full review and grade. Nothing left to do now but get on the plane, nothing left to really explore. Unfortunately, there really wasn't much to explore anyway, seeing as nearly everything was closed down since it was, you know, the middle of the night. I'll do my best to grade this place fairly despite the time I was here and the amount of time spent here. All scores out of 10.

Cleanliness-8.7-Super clean, save for some occasional trash left by another person staying overnight. Staff was on top of it. Almost too on top of it, considering some little Spanish teen punk basically kicked a few of us out of our section in the upstairs McDonalds so he could clean the floors. You know what, just because of that the score is down to 7.7. Fuck your floors dude.

Amenities-7.3-WiFi was good aside from when it wasn't/didn't work. Other than that, not a lot of great places to sit or lay down for long periods of time. They were good but not great.

Facilities-8.4-Shoutout McDonalds.

FINAL SCORE: 7.5/10. I don't care if that math does or doesn't add up, nerds. A solid airport you have, madrid. Would have been nice to experience it with everything open and also not for 10 hours, but you just have to roll with the punches. I am also going to keep any spelling or grammar mistakes since I was basically insane by the end of this experience.

All I know is I'll probably have reviews for Heathrow and Boston Logan in May when I visit them for the last/next times. Hoping to get a few other airports in as well (I travel, nbd).

Scientists Discover Just How Much Pee Is In Our Swimming Pools

The Guardian-It is an antisocial act that normally goes under the radar, but many swimmers have long suspected the truth: people are peeing in the pool.

Now scientists have been able to confirm the full extent of offending for the first time, after developing a test designed to estimate how much urine has been covertly added to a large volume of water. Regular swimmers with a keen sense of hygiene may wish to stop reading now.

The test works by measuring the concentration of an artificial sweetener, acesulfame potassium (ACE), that is commonly found in processed food and passes through the body unaltered.

Big news coming out today. They finally found out a way to actually tell you how much of your pool is made up of pee. Now when I first saw the headline, my first thought was "All of it". It's all pee, especially for public pools. And I thought that was validated when The Guardian wrote that regular swimmers with a keen sense of hygiene may want to stop reading the report. I was thinking we would be getting a South Park situation.

And as that episode told us, acceptable pee levels for water parks is about 83%, so I figure public pools are around 45% for acceptable pee levels before the structure of the pool is compromised. 

But then I read this part: "After tracking the levels of the sweetener in two public pools in Canada over a three-week period they calculated that swimmers had released 75 litres of urine – enough to fill a medium-sized dustbin – into a large pool (about one-third the size of an Olympic pool) and 30 litres into a second pool, around half the size of the first."

First of all, tracking the pee in public pools in Canada...

"Sorrey for all the urine! We didn't stop on the way back from Manitoba! Sorrey!"



This part-"75 litres of urine"-made me think I was validated. Well I am also not good with any sort of units of measurement, especially when it comes to the liquids. Ounces, liters (get out of my face with your spelling, United Kingdom), the only pint I know is when I order one at a pub. So I really had no clue what I was actually looking at. But they clarified it in terms I can understand.


"...enough to fill a medium-sized dustbin – into a large pool (about one-third the size of an Olympic pool) and 30 litres into a second pool, around half the size of the first."

Are you kidding me? That's nothing! A medium-sized dustbin of piss in a pool 1/3 the size of an Olympic pool? Half a fist of piss in another pool? That's basically like adding more water to the pool. I could be in the pool and you could pour a medium-sized dustbin of pee into the water in front of my eyes, and I probably wouldn't even notice. Practically zero urine in those pools. I did love this part though...

"The findings make for unwelcome reading, but swimmers might find some comfort in the measurements from eight hot tubs, which were found to have far higher urine levels. One hotel Jacuzzi had more than three times the concentration of sweetener than in the worst swimming pool."

People piss more in hot tubs than pools? Really, you don't say! Of course they (we) do. Hot tubs are filled with piss-warm water as it is, we think we can be discreet and add some more warm liquid to the mixture of hot water and gross body runoff. Add in the bubbles and jets in the hot tub and you basically have the perfect sit-in toilet. Nice and relaxing for you to empty your bladder and have it be instantly swirled around to mask any trace of yellow. I think my goal for wealth should be to own a hot tub solely for urinating in. That's luxury. 




Frankly, I am fairly underwhelmed by this study. I may just maintain the line of thinking that public pools are essentially all pee just because you have to believe in something. Never meet your heroes, and never read a scientific study debunking all your piss-in-the-pool myths. 




PS-A few other parts I liked:


*"Lindsay Blackstock, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and lead author, said: “Our study provides additional evidence that people are indeed urinating in public pools and hot tubs.”

You didn't need science to tell you people pee in pools, Lindsay. Throw your "additional evidence" out the window. The sky is blue, the sun rises in the east, and people love peiing in pools.

*"Michael Phelps, agreed it was acceptable behaviour. “I think everybody pees in the pool,” he said. “Chlorine kills it, so it’s not bad.”

Love this line of thinking from Phelps. Chlorine kills pee, so it's basically like you never even peed. Genius. 

PPS-I am forever scarred by public pools because of one incident at Disney World. In 7th grade my family went down to Florida (my brother was like 4 at the time, before you think of questioning my reasoning for being there) and stayed at the Polynesian Resort (Tahiti lodge stand up) because it is without a doubt the best of the resorts there and I will not hear any argument or slander on the subject. Well one night after dinner we decided to go to one of the pools. Now I haven't been there since, but if nothing has changed then there's a volcano slide at the pool, and a cave song the side you could run through to get form one end of the pool to the other. Well I went running through the cave and stepped in something. Didn't know what it was and since it was dark didn't stop to look. Just sort of assumed someone had dropped food. Well I get out of the cave to where it's lighter out, and wouldn't you know, I had stepped in someones poop. FUCKING DISGUSTING. I had legit shellshocked, as if I had just stepped off the front lines at the Battle of the Somme in WWI. I was paralyzed. Finally, I come to my senses and hop over to a grassy patch to wipe my foot off. I then go to rinse my foot in one of those foot showers they have. the whole time I am practically fighting back tears. How could this happen to me at such a magical place? ( I had yet to truly learn the types of vile beasts that venture to Disney in Florida). Well I haven't been to Disney since then, also largely in part due to the fact I am 21 with younger siblings who have also outgrown the mystique of Disney. I've been to maybe 2 public pools since. The point of this story is to say public pools and public hot tubs are for peasants and only bad things can happen at those places.