Up in the Cypriot air: out of time, out of place

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While walking down Apstolou Pavlou Ave, passing the many outlets down to the Lighthouse beach, it struck me how from on moment to the other, we can change our settings without any physical effort. 

The airplane for many people is seen as a place of boredom or fear. By travelling by plane, you enter an ‘out-of-time’ zone, the only thing that could ask for any exertion is the long lines of security checks, the attempt to keep your self warm under the extreme cold air in the plane and the fighting against your jetlag. However, this is quite similar to the lack of exercise when one is driving a car or a passenger on a train, when you’re up in the air, it is transforming the sensory experiences of ‘being mobile’. Nothing from your place of destination could touch the senses, nothing could really prepare you for what is yet to come: a new landscape, smell, air, humidity, breeze, light and sound. Nonetheless, we are being stimulated, whether it is spontaneously by a nice chat with a local Cypriot next to you or the crying baby from the couple in front of you, or a customized, commercial kind of stimuli such as through images from the airline magazine, the pilot’s announcement on the current whether and time or the travel program shown on the small television screens. These encounters might enable you to mentally prepare, and make you forget about the fact that all of this exists in a capsule of three-dimensional movement through space. The moment when I first smelled the Mediterranean sea walking towards the beach in Paphos, made me realise how transport impacts your first impressions of, and relations to an unknown place. Aircraft and its particular patterns and practices of movement exposes passengers to new physical sensations.While driving a bike gives me the ultimate sense of speed, danger, risk and freedom, a moment of corporeal travel, entering the airplane serves as a moment to subside, a moment of reflection accompanied with bodily discomforts associated

with increased speed, lack of freedom and altitude. Flying therefore has fundamentally changed our perceptions of time, space, distance, and speed, and transformed what it means to be mobile.