A few years ago, Alain de Botton wrote a book titled A Week At the Airport, about his time living at Heathrow airport for a week. Below’s an excerpt from the book in Harper’s magazine that resonated. It’s a special feeling when you return home from a long trip and put your head down at night and then think back to the place where you woke up. I remember when I once woke up in a small village in Costa Rica where there was no hot water, I then traveled all day, and by night was lying in bed in rich San Francisco. The contrast in my environments was striking. De Botton:
There used to be time to arrive. Incremental geographic changes would ease the inner transitions: desert would gradually give way to shrub, savannah to grassland. At the harbor, the cam- els would be unloaded, a room would be found overlooking the customs house, passage would be negotiated on a steamer. Flying fish would skim past the ship’s hull. The crew would play cards. The air would cool.
Now a traveler may be in Abuja on Tuesday and at the end of a satellite in the new terminal at Heathrow on Wednesday. Yesterday lunch time, one had fried plantain in the Wuse Dis- trict to the sound of an African cuckoo, whereas at eight this morning the captain is closing down the 777’s twin engines at a gate next to a branch of Costa Coffee.
Despite one’s exhaustion, one’s senses are fully awake, registering everything—the light, the signage, the floor polish, the skin tones, the me- tallic sounds, the advertisements—as sharply as if one were on drugs, or a newborn baby, or Tolstoy. Home all at once seems the strangest of destinations, its every detail relativized by the other lands one has visited. How peculiar this morning light looks against the memory of dawn in the Obudu hills, how unusual the recorded announcements sound after the wind in the High Atlas, and how inexplicably English (in a way they will never know) the chat of the two female ground staff seems when one has the din of a street market in Lusaka still in one’s ears.
One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpoising home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wiesbaden and Luoyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
(Hat tip Steve Dodson.)
The reverse culture shock is a real thing. I arrived back in Vancouver after 6 months of backpacking Asia and was hypersensitive to the differences. The peculiarities of life, from what people wear to the shape of the street signs and the attitude of bus drivers, were all starkly different. Like you’ve said here, it is difficult but important to keep that perspective and a sense of awe at how unique our own setting is. It’s definitely something I’ve tried to keep in mind.