Travel time

There is something funny about the time we take to travel. Not the destination part, but time taken to get there, to move about, to go from point A to B. This time is difficult to count, moving across and over international zones, leaving us to live in the moment and away from the tick tick of a minutehand. Outside of our agendas. Not quite in our plans.

I love getting lost in time.

This lady gets things done in an airport A&W

Mostly, on-the-plane time is for secret asides. Watching as many idiotic movies as possible. Drinking altitude-reinforced whiskey or bloody marys. Sometimes it is for writing. On some sordid occasions it has been time for working, but let’s forget those. Because this time should be sacred. It doesn’t count and so is a bonus, a privilege of extra, at least for someone from a culture of too much.

Because there are no real rules in travel time, habits and traditions are ours to invent. I almost never eat Dunkin Donuts outside of an airport, but I’ve now done it in a dozen states and countries and over three continents. My secret Dunkin travel addiction. In Indonesia, they have red bean and green tea donuts. Who am I to turn that down? It would be a cultural affront.

In Tokyo a day ago on a stopover, I walked the insides of the airport, an extra-time traveler in her own particular non-space. I’ll be in Tokyo proper in not too long, but this was already a sense overload. The amount of duty-free chaos in Narita is overwhelming. So many colors, so many smiling Japanese characters peering from every adspace, so many samurai boutiques. And the cleanest toilets- with and without bidets- I have every seen. All with the overarching neutrality of in-between. The line for McDonalds wrapped around the corridor. The line for ramen decidedly did not. Everything expressed in dollars and yen, translations and generics. An over-cartoonish group of fake traditional musicians walked around and played, posing for pictures. Why? Why advertise their local performance to the detached dwellers of the airport food court? It was amazingly surreal.

Narita airport performers.

If you are keeping track of the places you have visited, stopovers accrued during travel don’t count. You aren’t really there, you don’t really exist. I can’t really say I’ve been to Jakarta, though I’m typing now waiting in a Jakarta terminal. I slept last night in a hotel inside the Jakarta airport. I walked the outside drop-off area this morning and sat at a Jakarta fountain overlooking the Jakarta parking lot and a lawn of forbidden Jakarta grass and palm trees.

Jakarta 1am shuttle-bus view.

It doesn’t count because for me and my fellow travelers- unlike the airport itself, its workers, its amenities and its plantlife- real life doesn’t happen at any of these places. I am in Jakarta but I am not. This is in-between for me and so I am also in-between. Quintessentially, I took a shuttle bus last night from my arrival terminal to the terminal my hotel was in. I mentioned my destination to the driver, who told me to get in. I found, after a period of time that could as easily have been ten or thirty minutes, that I had been brought to the same place I had been originally. A round trip in non-space and outside of time. It’s such an appealing wormhole, assuming you’re not really that worried about actually getting anywhere.

Someone told me once that jetlag is your soul catching up with your body. I really like this idea. That there is a part of you that just can’t travel as fast as a tin can hurtling through space and that you have to live like a partial zombie for a bit while it finds you. If this is the case with jet lag, I like to think of this extra secret lost time as recuperation for the mind, slowing down after too much mundane regular action and buzzing activity. Your mind catching up with your body after too much everyday, and before or after the stimulation and expectation upon arrival.

Perhaps getting lost in time is another built-in catch-up with yourself, your everyday self catching up with the moment.

In any case, it is delicious.