August 9th, 2006, 5:01 am

Airport refugee

0:32 a.m. August 9, 2006. London Stansted Airport.

They’re everywhere, the bodies. Huddled under signs. Draped across benches. Piled up in twos and threes along walkways.

The lucky ones found bench seats without handles.

The rest of us make do with the floor … the cold, hard, unforgiving faux-marble floors of London’s Stansted Airport.

It’s half past midnight, and there won’t be any flights for at least another five hours.

And so we huddle, airport refugees.

I can smell Jon’s feet. Arien’s sleeping on top of his pajama pants. I put mine on - and socks … anything to create some barriers between me and the ground.

We have a hostel right now - booked, London Hostel, or something like that. But round trip, it’ll cost us about £20 to get to it. Our flight to Oslo leaves at 6am; we’d have to be here at 4, the bus to get here takes an hour and leaves earliest at 3; so we’d have to get on the underground at about 2 to get to the bus; and none of us are even sure that it runs that late … so all and all, we decided to rough it on the floors of the airport for the night. I’d rather do that than risk not making our flight to Oslo - Ryanair is notoriously unforgiving when it comes to missed flights.

We’re not alone. There must be at least 200 people, parked out in various sections of the airport. Likely, a lot of them are here for the same reasons we are - early flights, and central London is too far away and too expensive to get to.

Ridiculousness, eh? I want a Stansted hostel.

But back to trying to sleep, curled up on some laundry.