Photograph: Dubai airport : NPR

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Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly collection during which NPR's worldwide group shares moments from their lives and work all over the world.

Whereas returning to the U.S. a dozen years in the past from a reporting task in Kabul, I had a protracted layover on the Dubai Worldwide Airport and bought to understand it nicely — its ebb and circulation from quiet to clamor and again, as passengers from all around the planet arrived and left.

With hours to fill between flights, I roamed for miles round this colossal airport, the busiest international hub in the world . I marveled on the gold retailers, wandered previous the McDonald's and Starbucks, browsed the camel's milk chocolate and Cuban cigars, rested within the Zen Backyard. I heard Arabic, Hindi, English, Chinese language and French. I spritzed myself with fragrance on the duty-free retailers and determined to get a pedicure at 2 a.m. The person sitting subsequent to me getting his ft executed at that hour was a U.S. Marine. The combination of familiarity and disorientation on the airport made me really feel I may be anyplace, in all places — and nowhere in any respect.

William Gibson noticed in his novel Sample Recognition that long-haul flights get us to our locations so quick that it will probably take awhile for our souls to meet up with our our bodies: "Souls cannot transfer that shortly, and are left behind, and should be awaited, upon arrival, like misplaced baggage," he wrote.

I considered this once I was again in transit at DXB one night earlier this month, and snapped this picture throughout a quiet second. With a number of hours stretching forward of me earlier than my subsequent flight, I noticed that I get pleasure from lengthy layovers on the Dubai airport as a result of they offer me house — in good firm with tens of 1000's of others heading from one a part of the world to a different — to take inventory of the place I have been and the place I am going. It was, for me, an ideal limbo.

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