The cafeteria is lively and buzzing.  Kyrgyz music videos blare out of a nearby television as a few ofitsantkas run back and forth to the kitchen carrying plates overflowing with lagman, mastava, samsa, and pirozhki.  I sigh heavily as I pour another cupful of green tea into the small bowl called a piala that is used as a teacup here in Osh.  People come and go as nearly every table remains full, people wrapped in faux fur coats and hats, with several pieces of luggage by their side, each carefully wrapped several times in plastic wrap.

It’s 2am, and I’ve learned a very important lesson about flying in Central Asia: your flights are scheduled at the airline’s convenience, not yours.

Central Asia is about 4-7 hours from most places in Europe like Istanbul and Frankfurt, and about equally as far from major cities in Asia like Beijing and Hong Kong.  For a Central Asian airline, that’s great.  If you have a plane, you can fly it to those places.  But, many airlines here don’t have an adequate safety record to fly to Europe, or for foreigners to have permission from their employers to fly on them.  So, you rely on Turkish Airlines.

Since the markets in Central Asia are so small, but are just at the maximum range of many small planes, airlines are limited in what they can fly here.  Thus, a lesson in economics comes to the forefront.  When there is only one flight a day on the route you need, the price no longer depends on what time the flight departs.  But in Europe, the time does matter. A lot.  People tend to not take the midnight flight from Istanbul to Antalya; they’d rather take the 6pm.  So, there is an enormous opportunity cost to operating the flights to Central Asia during the day, when it would be most comfortable.  Instead, they operate the planes on intra-Europe flights during the day, and dispatch them off to the far-flung countries of the world on alternating evenings at 7pm.

Thus, as every foreigner to visit here has learned, to fly to Central Asia, you almost always take a flight on Turkish Airlines leaving Istanbul between 6 and 10 pm and arriving well before sunrise in your destination.  Russian airlines do this, Kyrgyz airlines do this… about the only daytime flights in Central Asia are the flights to China and the flights to Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

I still remember my first time arriving in the region in this fashion.  It was October 2012, and at about 2 in the morning, my 747 from Frankfurt touched down in Tehran, alongside flights from Rome and Amsterdam.  In fact, there is no time busier at Imam Khomeini Airport than 2am as the 5 flights from the European airlines land at almost the same time.  They leave Europe at 6pm, and they get back at 6am.  And Tehran is celebrating.

We walked off the plane, and after relaxing in an arrivals lounge while our passports were processed, we cleared customs (incidentally, Iran was one of the most straightforward and pleasant customs experiences of my life), and as soon as we walked into the arrivals hall, we saw the onslaught of families.  In Central Asia and Iran, entire families will travel to the airport to welcome home a family member or a friend, and everywhere we looked families were smiling and embracing each other.  It was completely alive, a celebration of family and friends.

I remember, too, departing Tajikistan in the same fashion.  We slept until about 1, headed to the airport, and waiting for us there were many local friends who had come all the way to the airport at 3 in the morning to hug us and wish us off.

And, perhaps my most memorable midnight airport story, last winter, as I headed off to the airport, my family chased me down in my taxi so that they could drive me to the airport themselves and buy me a midnight dinner before my flight.  They also met me when I returned three weeks later, again at 3am in the midst of terrible fog, and drove me again to the airport for two other early morning flights.

As it turns out, unlike the United States where one might be chased from an airport in the middle of the night, across Central Asia, there is no time when the airport comes more alive with people coming and going, families saying goodbye and welcoming people back, and everything in between.  When I leave Kyrgyzstan in May, I plan to make a point to get to the airport early so I can sit in the cafeteria and watch the wonderful world that is a Central Asian airport at 3am.