The Strange Feeling of Knowing Airports Better Than Neighborhoods

I could walk you from the arrivals hall of Zurich Airport to the third-floor lounge with my eyes closed. The turn past the watch shop. The escalator that always runs slow. The corner table by the window where the light is best in the morning.

I have been to Zurich fourteen times. I could not tell you the name of a single street in the city itself.

After a decade of accompanying my employer across more than forty destinations, this is the quiet embarrassment I've stopped trying to hide.

I know the world's airports intimately, and the world's cities barely at all.

The map in my head is built entirely of terminals.

I know which lounge in Singapore serves the good laksa and which one only pretends to. I know the gate numbers that mean a long walk in Frankfurt. I know where the quiet corner is in Heathrow, the one behind the pillar where no announcement seems to reach.

I have memorised the insides of buildings designed to be passed through, and forgotten the places they were built to deliver me to.

There's an irony in it I feel most on the drive out.

The transfer pulls away from the terminal I know so well, and the actual city begins to move past the window — the markets, the shuttered shops, the people walking home. A whole living place I'll pass through and never enter.

I've spent more hours in the waiting rooms between destinations than in the destinations themselves.

For years I told myself this was just the shape of the work. The schedule owns the day. You land, you clear, you transfer, you deliver, you leave. The neighbourhood was never mine to know.

But that's not the whole truth.

The truth is I let the airport become the whole trip because it was easier. The terminal asks nothing of me. It's the same in every language — the same signage, the same coffee, the same recycled air. The airport is a place with no risk of getting lost, and somewhere along the way I chose that safety over actually arriving.

A neighbourhood, by contrast, could confuse me. It could ask me to slow down, to not know something, to be a stranger on a street with no gate number to follow.

I noticed how far it had gone in Rome last year. Three days in the city. And when a colleague asked what the neighbourhood near the hotel was like, I realised I'd seen it only through glass — the car window in, the car window out. I knew the airport lounge by heart and the city not at all.

That was the day something shifted.

Now, when the schedule allows even an hour, I make myself leave the transfer behind and walk. No gate to reach. No terminal to map. Just a street I don't know, in a city I keep claiming to have visited.

The airports will always be there, learned by heart. It's the neighbourhoods I've decided to stop passing through.

Because I don't want to reach the end of this work having memorised the whole world's waiting rooms — and none of the places worth waiting for.

For more on what the space between destinations quietly teaches us, read What Airport Transfers Teach Us About Control.