Early Bird Special

My colleague and I had arrived way too early for our flight. It was my fault: I’d misread the departure time. And so we had breakfast at FLL – though anyone who has departed from here knows that the breakfast offerings are no great shakes – and sat in a near-empty terminal reading trashy magazines.

Trashy magazines are one of the joys of travel, further proof that you are a completely different person when you’re inside Airworld. My colleague devoured some celebrity gossip magazines that she normally would never read. (I hope.)

An empty airport in the morning is a place with a different kind of hum. It is more of a village, not yet a city. And it functions in a kind of state of preparation – for the thousands of travellers about to descend and the thousands waiting to depart. In the evening, an airport is quieter still, but it is, again, a different kind of quiet. Then, it is the quiet of winding down. Of vacuums and the shuffling of tired feet. Of stores and bars closing. An airport at midnight is a city street at 4 a.m. The quiet of closing time as opposed to the quiet before dawn.

While I was waiting and watching this preparation, this city awakening to its day’s work, a bird caught my attention: a small sparrow stuck inside the terminal, trying to find a way out. I’ve seen birds in airports before – it’s not hard for them to get into a building with so many exits – but this one spent over two hours flying from one end of the terminal to the other, looking for a way out. I wasn’t that worried about it; there’s food in a terminal, after all, and I could imagine at some point, later in the day, when the terminal was going at full capacity, with airplanes lining up at every gate, that this bird was going to get out.

But I watched the bird for a good hour, hoping it wouldn’t fly into the windows (which it didn’t, luckily) and thinking about the irony of it all. (Even more ironic, I was tweeting about this bird the whole time, which is only fitting since the symbol for Twitter is… a little bird.)

Soon the terminal started to fill up. The noises I usually associate with an airport returned, and the place felt, once again, like a city. I bought lunch, I read some more and I people-watched. At an airport, we can learn about the world in a very real way. Look around you. These are the people taking ideas to other places. The people making connections, moving, dancing around the world from airport to airport, from city to city. From the quiet to the bustle.

The AB list

The Fairmont Turnberry Isle Resort & Club, Aventura, Florida
Golf courses designed by Raymond Floyd, three pools, spacious rooms and the Bourbon Steak restaurant by celebrity chef Michael Mina (the drinks at the lovely bar are worth the trip alone). If the bustle and late nights of South Beach aren’t for you, and if you’re even remotely a golfer, Turnberry Isle is the answer. It’s extremely family-friendly, and the enormous Aventura Mall is just across the street.
19999 W. Country Club Dr., Miami, 866-840-8069, fairmont.com/turnberryisle

SkyRoll Garment Bag
I’ve talked about my disdain for rolling luggage before. I still disdain it. So my bag, the SkyRoll, is something that continues to amaze me years after I started using it. We all know that rolled clothes don’t wrinkle. The SkyRoll takes that concept and… rolls with it. Basically a garment bag that rolls around a central cylinder (where you can pack shoes, toiletries and your smelly laundry), it’s so easy to carry, you won’t miss the wheels. Really.
skyroll.com

Frequent flyer Arjun Basu is the former editor-in-chief of enRoute and the author of Squishy, a collection of short stories. abasu@spafax.com