Vice President Joe Biden has been known to speak his mind on occasion, and by now most people know that biting his tongue isn’t one of his best skills, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when he spoke poorly of LaGuardia Airport, in New York, but it might be surprising to hear that he compared it to an airport in a third world country.

“If I blindfolded someone and took them at 2 o’clock in the morning into the airport in Hong Kong and said ‘where do you think you are?’ They would say ‘this must be America. This is a modern airport,'” said Biden. “If I took them blindfolded and took them to LaGuardia airport in New York, he would be like ‘I must be in some third world country.’ I’m not joking.”

Some may think that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio would be in scramble mode after Biden made his comments, and quickly assemble a team to make all the necessary improvements, but that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, he seemed annoyed at what Biden said and struck back.

“LaGuardia obviously needs an upgrade,” he said in a press conference. “But that being said the airport manages an extraordinary amount of traffic and the people work there make it work under very difficult circumstances. So as a proud New Yorker, I didn’t like that comment, and I think it was not the right way to talk about it.”

The people who run LaGuardia, which are the folks at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said they don’t totally disagree with Biden’s assessment, which is why they’re making a lot of improvements in the years to come.

“Significant investment in transportation infrastructure is the key to growing our economy and creating jobs,” they said. “Which is why the Port Authority this week proposed a 10-year $27 billion capital plan that creates more than 126,000 jobs and invests $8 billion in modernizing the region’s airports.”

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