Photo Dubai airport

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.

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.

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