Over the past month, I have travelled more than I did in this entire year. And spend the equivalent of several days in planes and airports. Am forever fascinated by this mode of journey despite the little annoyances of getting through immigration and security.
Watching people – as they wait, as they look towards going somewhere and arriving at their destinations, fills me with sober hope.
Thats the number of hours I spent last week around airports and airplanes while I made a short impromptu trip to India. This brings it to a total of about 160 hours spent around these things. The irony of long duration flights for me is that towards the end, I am both thoroughly exhausted and at the same time incredibly mentally relaxed.
Airports and Railway stations are some of the most fascinating places to watch life go by. They are at all times, flooded with people with hopes, with dreams, with aspirations and with purpose – all trying to go somewhere – maybe the first vacation of their lives; to grab that dream job; for meeting their friends or loved ones; to attend to an emergency; to home; to experience experiences never experienced before; for business; or to just make a living at those places, to get by the day, while watching others, in hopes that one day they might join the crowd, to go somewhere.
When I took a flight back to Amsterdam from my trip to Prague, I couldn’t shake the feeling of the need to take a moment to retrospect and realised that I felt some of those emotions, which I seem to remember in vivid detail, every time I landed at or took off from this particular Schiphol Airport.
(Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam)