The Allure of the Airport

Looking at the sprawling spiderweb that connects the world’s airports, I often imagine myself as a tiny dot on one of those arcing lines, slowly traversing the distance between two larger dots, which incredibly represent entire cities full of tiny dots like me. I dream of spending my life moving from point to point on the map, discovering what makes each of those identical dots different.

The feeling I get when entering the airport is probably comparable to the feeling a beer lover might get if he walked into a bar with all the world’s brews on tap. For an airport is possibility, and possibility is intoxicating. As I walk by the gates I observe where each one is heading. Get on this plane, go to Bali. Get on that one, go to Bogota. Then step out into a new day— one with warmer air, brighter colors, and surrounded by sea of strange tongues. The prospect of so easily exchanging one environment for another is enormously appealing to me; just three hours separate London fog from the Spanish sun.

An airport is a modern-day harbor, constantly buzzing with activity, as travelers arrive and depart, and thousands of bags criscross unseen conveyor belts on their way to a final destination. People from across the world convene at these amazingly intricate nodes, bringing with them their hometown newspapers, fashions, and foods. So many people, so many stories, so many reasons for their fleeting presence in this window to the world. Keep reading...

Linguistic Blessings and Duties

It used to make me feel bad that, when traveling, I can count on the people I encounter to speak English, and generally have no need to learn their language. This expectation seemed unfair at best and imperialist at worst. It was conducive to linguistic laziness, as well as a failure to immerse myself in the culture I had come to observe and experience. It just seemed wrong to come to someone’s country and expect them to speak your language.

Lately, however, I’ve been seeing things differently. Ever since the fall of the Tower of Babel, the world has needed a common language to facilitate interlingual communication. Phoenecian was the first lingua franca, followed by Greek, Latin, French, and, for most of the past two centuries, English.

As a native speaker of this versatile language, I should view my ability to communicate virtually anywhere as a privilege, not a crutch or an embarrassment. This, however, in no way excuses me from learning, at the very least, a few words and phrases in the language of the people with whom I’m speaking. Such a token effort is quickly rewarded with appreciative smiles and more amicable relations with the locals. Furthermore, and it hardly needs mentioning, the deeper one delves into a given language, the better one will come to understand the culture it represents.

Those of us fortunate enough to speak fluent, native English should be encouraged to use this gift for the benefit of our extra-lingual friends—by teaching new immigrants or going abroad to teach others—and consider it a motivation, not a deterrent, to learn additional languages ourselves. Keep reading...