I'VE BEEN fascinated by airports and airplanes ever since I was a boy who tagged along to what was then the Manila International Airport to see off a neighbor who was going to be a nurse in the States. As God was my witness, I swore that, one day, I was going to get on one of those huge silver jets zooming off beyond the horizon to parts unknown.

Half a century and two dozen countries later, and thanks to the writing life, I can say that I’ve been to more places and on more planes than I could have ever imagined, to corners as remote as South Africa and New Zealand. The plane ride itself has become more of a chore than a wonder, and I can’t wait for the plane to land almost as soon as I get on board, maybe because I almost always have to ride like a creaky jackknife in economy.

But I’ve never lost my eagerness to get to another airport and to wander around during stopovers. ”I’d rather take a flight with lots of them than a straight one, anytime,” never mind that many airports today tend to have the same Starbucks, Tie Rack, and Sharper Image shops. It must be the writer in me at work, but there’s always something different about every airport, not just in the goods or amenities they offer, but in the menagerie of people who pass through them and in the implicit drama that every departure and arrival brings with it.

Like emergency wards and police stations, airports tend to collect people from all social classes and backgrounds, often in heightened emotional states conducive to great theater. While on a fellowship in the UK a decade ago, I was mesmerized by one of the earliest reality TV shows, not surprisingly titled “Airport,”which dealt with the travails of passengers going through customs and immigration at Heathrow, and inevitably with the stories people make up to get their foot and their goods” not always legal ones in the door.

Indeed I often find myself parked in a corner of the transit lounge, observing my fellow passengers and constructing their fictional histories as a kind of finger exercise. In my creative writing class, I sometimes ask students to write me a goodbye scene at the airport ”with the requirement that they will not use the word goodbye,”to force them to find other verbal and visual ways of expressing the sentiment. (And now and then a real drama takes place: a few months ago, a fellow passenger collapsed and convulsed while waiting for our Cebu Pacific flight to Cebu; he had the uncanny fortune of having former Health Undersecretary Jimmy Galvez Tan on the same flight, and Jimmy led a group of volunteers, including a nurse who had just arrived from Saudi Arabia, in saving him.)

But aside from serving as a set with props, airports today are, of course, also the crowning glories of modern architecture, the showpiece of the host country, of which it just might be the only thing a transit passenger will ever see. Not too long ago, the Brussels-based Skytrax World Airport Awards recognized ten of the world’s best airports, based on the results of almost 10 million survey forms. In descending order, they were Singapore Changi, Incheon International, Hong Kong International, Munich, Kuala Lumpur, Zurich, Amsterdam Schiphol, Beijing Capital, Auckland, and Bangkok Suvarnabhumi. Much to my surprise, I realized that I’d been to all of them except one: ”Zurich, to which I hope a kind benefactor will send me one of these days to buy him a box of chocolates. (Of the top ten, I do agree with Changi and HKI as the top two, although I slightly prefer HKI over Changi because of the free wifi and the great Chinese food choices.)

One of the most inspired airport ideas comes from Schiphol in Amsterdam, which put up something that every airport should have for the thousands of passengers sitting glass-eyed in the departure lounge with hours to kill and maybe no more money to spend: a library. Writes Nicola Clark in the New York Times: Between Piers E and F and alongside the airport branch of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the collection is meant to be read on site and left on the shelves for others to browse. The library plans to offer e-books and music by Dutch artists and composers that can be downloaded, free, to a laptop or cellphone. The library also is equipped with nine Apple iPads loaded with multimedia content, including photos and videos, that is likewise devoted to the theme of Dutch culture. A digital guest book invites visitors to jot down their musings or leave messages for wayward companions. ProBiblio, a library NGO that runs the Schiphol library, has done the same thing in beaches across beaches in Europe and plans to extend the service to train stations. Why not libraries with the best of Philippine fiction and nonfiction at NAIA and Boracay?