Getting There: Part I

My mind likes to wonder when it has nothing useful to occupied itself with and waiting hours at airports make for the most fascinating opportunities to do so. In other words, being bored brings my over-thinking nature to dangerous levels. So, while in Dubai, I turned my laptop on and I wrote the following:

Somehow, when I look around and realize I am sitting in Dubai’s airport at four o’clock in the morning reading Lonely Planet’s wise words on New Zealand, a gift given to me by a polish friend in Spain, while I wait to board a flight which is still going to stop in Thailand and Australia before finally reaching my destination, I can't help but to smile. Even though I am only half-way through a forty-hour odyssey of airplanes and airports and I am tired, hungry and smelly, I smile. Granted, I am in a constant state of financial bankruptcy, I have no ties to anywhere, I am single and I say hello as much as I say goodbye. But I smile.

A few hours after I wrote this short pearl of philosophical self-wisdom, life decided (for once) to prove me right. As I was about to pass the boarding gate, I notice a guy looking puzzled at the screen displaying “Casablanca” instead of “Christchurch”. In a sarcastic impulse, I shouted a “don’t worry, they just assume New Zealand and Morroco are not that different so there’s no need to change this; you are in the right place”.

Following these not-even-that-funny initial words and discovering that we were both doing Dubai-Christchurch (he was a new-zealander native of Russian father and Irish mother, returning home from a six-month training in the French Army), we spend the next twenty-four hours almost uninterruptedly together submerged in time zones, endless distances, economy class chairs, airplane food, waiting lobbies and security check queues. And so we laughed, talked, said nothing, complained, praised, watch movies, laid our heads on each other’s shoulders, hold each other’s hands and carried each other through an exhausting journey. The whole thing, even the ending, felt like I was living my very own Before Sunrise moment with a less eloquent and wit dialogue but with all the essence of a perfect encounter between two strangers.

By the end of it all, I knew we both had served as a perfect support to the other (at least he was to me). Above all, I knew that as soon as those wheels opened and touched the ground, we would go our separate ways. After 24 hours of constant contact, we would never see each other again. Nevertheless, while still way up high, with his arms around me and his body warmth making me fall asleep, I couldn’t help but to realize that New Zealand had already given me something I would never forget. And I smile.