Baggage tags on a bag, dates, times, my name. No, there aren’t actually times here. This would have been taken at the airport in Istanbul (IST) before we flew to Tripoli (TIP). Turkish Airlines TK637 now goes to Nairobi rather than to Tripoli; it doesn’t look like you can fly directly from Istanbul to Tripoli any more. I can’t recognize the bag in the photo: do we still have it? Some kind of black, soft bag. Maybe we do, though I don’t think it’s any longer part of our standard luggage.
What is the purpose of this photo? Why did I take it? Probably a sense of the singularity of the tag: I had never seen an Istanbul/Tripoli tag, or an anywhere/Tripoli tag, though I can’t imagine that I’ve actually seen an Istanbul/Nairobi tag, or, in fact, almost any combination of airports that you can imagine. There’s a sense of documentation here, though I wonder how much is with an idea of sharing, of boasting that you had a bag tag that no one else did. This might have been posted on Facebook; there was a time when people would post “JFK > TIP > IST,” slightly odd sequences of letters that suggested that you were leading a more exciting life than whoever was reading it. I haven’t seen those in a long time; maybe that’s because of the pandemic and there being generally less travel, though maybe everyone got tired of that; a fad wears itself out with time, you realize that you’re being obnoxious, that trumpeting your doings to everyone is silly in the end. But this was 2011.