Greetings from the Dubai airport, where a long layover can also be a destination

Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR’s international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.

While returning to the U.S. a dozen years ago from a reporting assignment in Kabul, I had a long layover at the Dubai International Airport and got to know it well — its ebb and flow from quiet to clamor and back, as passengers from all over the planet arrived and left.

With hours to fill between flights, I roamed for miles around this colossal airport, the busiest international hub in the world. I marveled at the gold shops, wandered past the McDonald’s and Starbucks, browsed the camel’s milk chocolate and Cuban cigars, rested in the Zen Garden. I heard Arabic, Hindi, English, Chinese and French. I spritzed myself with perfume at the duty-free shops and decided to get a pedicure at 2 a.m. The man sitting next to me getting his feet done at that hour was a U.S. Marine. The mix of familiarity and disorientation at the airport made me feel I might be anywhere, everywhere — and nowhere at all.

William Gibson observed in his novel Pattern Recognition that long-haul flights get us to our destinations so fast that it can take awhile for our souls to catch up with our bodies: “Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage,” he wrote.

I thought of this when I was back in transit at DXB one evening earlier this month, and snapped this photo during a quiet moment. With several hours stretching ahead of me before my next flight, I realized that I enjoy long layovers at the Dubai airport because they give me space — in good company with tens of thousands of others heading from one part of the world to another — to take stock of where I’ve been and where I’m going. It was, for me, a perfect limbo.

See more photos from around the world:

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• Greetings from Khartoum, Sudan, where those with the least offer their guests the most
• Greetings from Moscow, Russia, where Lenin’s tomb attracts a new surge of visitors
• Greetings from New Delhi, India, where performing monkeys spark delight — and ambivalence
• Greetings from Damascus, Syria, where a crowded bar welcomed post-Assad revelers
• Greetings from Alishan, Taiwan, whose red cypress forests offer timeless beauty
• Greetings from Odesa, Ukraine, where a Black Sea beach offers respite from war
• Greetings from Shenyang, China, where workers sort AI data in ‘Severance’-like ways
• Greetings from Palmyra, Syria, with its once-grand hotel named for a warrior queen
• Greetings from Mexico City, where these dogs ride a bus to and from school
• Greetings from the Galápagos Islands, where the blue-footed booby shows its colors
• Greetings from Afrin, Syria, where Kurds danced their hearts out to celebrate spring
• Greetings from Dharamshala, India, where these Tibetan kids were having the best time