Celebrity Sightings are...

...actually not that rare at the airport.

It's just that I usually miss out.

Two reasons: 

1) I don't know the celebrity. 
Our outbound flight today was graced with the company of a young Taiwanese singer and her entourage of managers/stylists/assistants---a whopping total of 15 people for one person. I was on the arrival shift today so I'd missed the departure briefing, during which our team had initially been informed of this special passenger.

(Rather anti-climatically, everyone present at that briefing was either Japanese or Korean, so no one knew who she was. The supervisor and I were asked later if we knew, and we didn't either...)

I googled her when I got home. She made her name as a finalist in a popular competitive singing TV show in Taiwan, has released a few albums already, cameo'd in a few dramas and has the sweetest voice. Sitting in the waiting area this afternoon, the star had looked just like any other passenger. No matter how high one soars, one is first-and-foremost-ly a person.

2) I'm just not there.
One afternoon a number of months ago, I was making my way towards the airport's rapid transit station after a shift. Completely ready to go home, I initiated relax-mode by going on tumblr to check activities of an idol band I follow.

 I board the train, start scrolling, and see fan-taken pictures of one of the members in front of an eerily familiar background. There's a weird chimney-looking monument in the shot, one I'd taken notice of and wondered about before. I look out the train window, and then it hit me: it was our airport's international arrivals curbside. I do a bit more digging and find out that the band member was at the airport that very morning. As in two hours ago. As in when I was working. As in I could have seen him.

As the airport from my view, I inwardly wonder at the controller of luck who'd decided that he/she/it'd mess with my life that day. Picking a fight with a lowly fangirl is a petty move, man.

After I finished moping, I thought about why he came here today. The idol band member had just launched his career last year in South Korea, but he hails from my country, from our shared City of Rain. Apparently this trip was a personal one; according to fans, no agency staff went with him and he was picked up at curbside by personal friends. He was coming home.

This entire event irrationally made him my favourite band member for a while, because of the idea of my idols being so close to home. But I really love being part of this place that, as soon as you touchdown on the runway, you immediately feel at ease. I love being part of the excitement and the comfort, the feeling of security, knowing that you're safe and that home is just a few blocks away.