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Kastrup's Lufthavne

Today I ended up at the Danish airport Kastrup together with Yuko from Apila and Kitagawa from Round Table to see them off after their Scandinavia+Scotland tour. After their flight SK983 for Narita took off I went for a stroll in the nearby town with the same name as the airport. Resting on a bench by the sea, watching plane after plane descending from the sky towards the airport I once again set my mind on how lovely poetic this word actually is. Its beauty is most visible right where I was, sitting in Denmark, glancing at Sweden and comparing the Swedish and the Danish. Flygplats vs lufthavne.

Flygplats, literary: flightplace, is hard, abrupt and leaves no room for imaginary thinking.

Lufthavne, literary: airport, is on the contrary a warm and inviting word. Only putting it in your mouth sets you off on a voyage not feasible in this world. Imagine weighing anchor and just drifting off into the open air. It's something one will only experience in dreams, or in a fairy tale. Just like Alice in the Wonderland. Or was it Lucy in the Sky?

Anyways, Kastrup is a good symbol for this linguistic difference, as it's placed right by the bridge connecting Denmark with Sweden. Further more, the descent towards Kastrup is all over water, and the pilot isn't casting his anchor until the very moment when water as well as, in his case, air turns into land.

So is an airport merely a place from where we fly?
Supposedly yes, but I'd rather continue to see it as our port towards the sky.