There are birds living inside Denver International Airport. I kid you not. I’m pretty sure they’re house sparrows, but their flighty, and my binoculars are stowed in my luggage, so I can’t give you a positive ID.

When last we met our intrepid international traveller (me), he was stuck in Prague, the victim of a late Czech Air flight and subsequent missed connection to the U.S. Prague? Not such a bad place to be stuck. But I can report, I think fairly, that Salt Lake City and Denver hold no similar charm for me at this point.

I’ve taken to enthusiastically following the little seat back TV map showing my flight’s progress, and I can confidently report that we were that close to getting into Denver last night on my flight from Frankfurt. The one that was already getting me home a day late. When the pilot, because of weather, had to put us into a holding pattern, that ultimately turned into a detour to Salt Lake City to refuel. (In fact, Salt Lake City is lovely, but not sitting on an airplane on the tarmac while the spend 90 minutes getting fuel.)

Then back to Denver, where we once again were put into a holding pattern, finally arriving four hours after our original scheduled arrival. Once I cleared Customs, the kind folks at Lufthansa (Recht schönen Dank!) got me rebooked on a flight for this morning (now Monday, I think, another day later than I intended) and a hotel voucher.

I’m a little too brain dead at 5 a.m. at gate C44 in the Denver airport to play well with the Kafkaesque metaphor that seemed so apropos in Prague. But in fact it may just be the wrong metaphor at this point. In fact, the efficient German Lufthansa bureaucracy worked with remarkable cheer and aplomb, given the entirely not human nature of the causes.

Now I’m on Delta, and they just announced that my flight has been delayed because one of the flight attendants called in sick. So it’s still unclear when I’ll get in to Albuquerque. Once I get a clearer head, I’ll try to get back to the Kafka.