FAR-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which the international team of NPR shares moments of their lives and works all over the world.
While I returned a dozen years ago to the US of a reporting cap order in Kabul, I had a long stopover at Dubai’s international airport and got to know well – the ebb and streams of silence to shouting and back, while passengers of the entire planet arrived and left.
To fill for hours between flights, I roamed miles around this colossal airport, the busiest international hub in the world. I wondered about the golden stores, walked past the McDonald’s and Starbucks, flipped through the camel milk chocolate and Cuban cigars, rested in the Garden. I heard Arabic, Hindi, English, Chinese and French. I sprit myself with perfume in the tax -free stores and decided to get a pedicure at 2 o’clock. The mix of fame and disorientation at the airport gave me the feeling that I am everywhere, everywhere – and nowhere.
William Gibson noticed in his novel Patron recognition That long -distance flights take us to our destinations so quickly that it can take a while before our soul catches up our bodies: “Souls cannot move so quickly and be left and should be expected on arrival, such as lost luggage,” he wrote.
I thought about this when I was back on DXB one evening earlier this month and took this photo during a quiet moment. With a few hours that stretched for me for my next flight, I realized that I enjoy long stops at Dubai airport because they give me space – in good company with tens of thousands of others who go from one part of the world to the other – to take the balance where I have been and where I go. It was a perfect limbo for me.
See more photos from all over the world:
- Greetings from Paris, where you can swim in the Seine for the first time in a century
- Greetings from Gujarat, India, where a Banyan tree is a place for peace, prayers and play
- Greetings from Khartoem, Sudan, where those with the least their guests offer the most
- Greetings from Moscow, Russia, where Lenin’s grave attracts a new increase in visitors
- Greetings from New Delhi, India, where performing monkeys Spark delight and ambivalence
- Greetings from Damascus, Syria, where a busy bar after Assad party goers welcomed
- Greetings from Alishan, Taiwan, whose red cypress forests offer timeless beauty
- Greetings from Odesa, Ukraine, where a Black Sea Beach Respite offers war
- Greetings from Shenyang, China, where employees sort AI data on the severance payment ‘
- Greetings from Palmyra, Syria, with his once hotel named after a warrior queen
- Greetings from Mexico City, where these dogs drive a bus from and from school
- Greetings from the Galápagos Islands, where the blue-footed booby shows its colors
- Greetings from Afrin, Syria, where Kurds dismissed their hearts to celebrate spring
- Greetings from Dharamshala, India, where these Tibetan children had the best time
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