NPR’s global staff shares vignettes from their lives and work throughout the world in their weekly series, Far-Flung Postcards.
When I had a lengthy layover at Dubai International Airport twelve years ago on my way back to the United States from a reporting assignment in Kabul, I became well acquainted with its ebb and flow from silence to cacophony and again, as travelers from all over the world came and went.
I spent hours wandering around this enormous airport, the busiest international hub in the world, in between flights. I stared at the gold shops, passed McDonald’s and Starbucks, looked at the Cuban cigars and camel’s milk chocolate, and relaxed in the Zen Garden. Arabic, Hindi, English, Chinese, and French were all audible to me. I opted to get a pedicure at two in the morning after spritzing myself with perfume at the duty-free stores. I was seated next to a U.S. Marine who was getting his feet done at that hour. I felt as though I might be anyone, anything, and nowhere at the airport due to the combination of familiarity and confusion.
Long-haul flights get us to our destinations so rapidly that it can take some time for our souls to catch up with our bodies, as William Gibson noted in his novel Pattern Recognition: “Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage,” he wrote.
One evening earlier this month, while I was back in transit at DXB, I had this idea and took this picture in a peaceful moment. As I had a few hours before my next flight, I came to the realization that I like lengthy layovers at the Dubai airport because they allow me to spend time with tens of thousands of people traveling from one place to another and reflect on my past and future. For me, it was the ideal state of limbo.
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