MIAMI -- Alex Ervasti has redefined the airport layover.
For more than eight weeks, Ervasti, a 49-year-old world traveler and failed businessman, lived at Miami International Airport -- not at the airport hotel, actually in the airport terminal.
''You've got to hand it to this guy. He knew just how to work the system to make a decent life in the airport,'' terminal operations manager Dickie Davis said.
Ervasti, a six-foot-one Finn with sandy gray hair and blue eyes, looks like many of the European travelers who come through MIA on their journeys to Central and South America. He wears jeans, boots, blazers, sometimes a hat. He speaks seven languages.
The only difference between him and his fellow European travelers was that Ervasti was headed nowhere. MIA was home.
''Eight weeks is unheard of,'' Davis said. ''We'd like to know the details.''
Ervasti's ordeal started Jan. 15 when he was at the Cali, Colombia, airport in the early morning with an Avianca ticket to Miami.
His plan, he said, was to get to Miami and get a ticket to London, where he would negotiate the sale of pre-Columbian artifacts and gold. His plan went afoul when he lost his wallet with $2,000 cash and all identification.
A cousin in Finland was to wire him some money, but it never came.
''I am not depressed living here because I have discipline and a strong mind,'' he told sympathetic travelers who gave him an average of $7 a day -- enough to establish a life.
Daily he would make the rounds for airport freebies: coffee, soda, newspapers of all kinds. He kept himself clean in the bathrooms, slept on incredibly uncomfortable chairs.
Finally, airport security realized that he was an all-too familiar face and kicked him out.
''I have lived well and not so well,'' Ervasti said. ''... It is better to survive on the edge.''
Now he is living at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, where he fears he won't last as long because it is so much smaller than MIA.
