The Stewardessen Breakfast Club

On City Lights and Shooting Stars.

Is it strange that I, as a flight attendant, most enjoy travelling when I am a passenger on board somebody else’s mode of transportation? And is it even stranger that my favourite time to travel is at night?

Ever since I was a child I have enjoyed sitting in the back seat of my father’s car, speeding down the autobahn at night. I would have had headphones on, some classical music playing (yeah, I was that child), not ever noticing the world go by; or the time.

And today I still feel the same way. I love travelling at night; most as a passenger, but even as a flight attendant I prefer night flights to day ones. To me, there is something magical about city lights on the ground; when flying over Europe they look like glittering pearls on a string, trying to outshine the stars above. They often rush by so fast they give me a strange sense of vertigo, a humbling sense of how small the aircraft and I are in the grand sense of the world.

When flying over central Africa, where the ground is mostly dark, the night sky becomes a spectacle of its own, as the stars are not just above, but to the left, right, and straight ahead as well; and sometimes even below. Again, how small is Earth compared to the rest of the universe?

I’ve had the privilege of seeing the ISS, Aurora Borealis, and even a Leonids shower from the panorama windows of a big jet flight deck.

But it is not just the views outside that draw me to the night flights. I love the quiet atmosphere on board. After everybody has had dinner and bedded down for the night, a special lull settles over the entire aircraft, the lights are low, and the ambient hum of the engines takes over from the previous chatter and the clinks of dinner ware.

Colleagues are settling down in small groups, with cups of tea and coffee in hands, conversation is hushed and oftentimes more intimate than appropriate. I tend to struggle to find sleep if it is a working flight for me, but still I find a few moments of peace and quiet here and there; stolen moments in the middle of my often hectic daily life.

Night journeys I find much better sleep on are those done on sleeper trains. A couple of years ago I treated myself to a sleeper car on the Cornish Riviera Express for a birthday. Admittedly not quite the Orient Express, but that didn’t dampen my excitement in the least. Arriving late in the evening at Paddington station to board a night train felt very bourgeoise, and I commenced it with as much internal fanfare as possibly imaginable.

I loved the little compartment with the double bunk beds, wardrobe and sink, and the big black window blind with the Great Western Railway logo. I treated myself to a hot chocolate in the restaurant car, and then settled down for the night. It felt quite like a slumber party for one, although I found the rhythmic rattle and ambient noise of the train rocking me to sleep almost immediately.

And in the morning I woke up at the other end of the country.

But still my most favourite kind of night travelling is in the back seat of someone else’s car, with my headphones on, completely lost to the world. The music from my headphones may have changed, but the sentiments remain the same.

About three weeks ago, one of my standby blocks turned into a Cyprus night stop. We arrived rather late at night in Larnaca, and were then driven in a minivan to the other end of the world, it felt; it was a long drive to the hotel. But as I watched the landscape rush by and change, motorways turning into quieter roads, and back into motorways, drifting in and out of sleep while counting star constellations in the night sky, I suddenly spotted a shooting star!

At that point I hadn’t seen any in a very long time, and with the mess my life has been recently, it felt very much like a wink from the universe, saying that somebody was still watching (I am not religious, but I like to believe that something more is out there than our little human brains can even begin to comprehend). It was a strange feeling, both exciting and soothing, oddly summing up the way I feel about night travelling as a whole.

Whatever mode of transportation I may be on, at night they all share a few qualities I treasure above all: the uncanny feeling of being in motion without actually moving, the quiet, ambient noise of engines running smoothly and other people sleeping close by, the stretch of space to think, to dream and imagine, the time and darkness to watch the night sky and experience its beauty, and the exotically foreign beds one gets to sleep in.

N.