For most people, an airport is somewhere you go when you’re traveling to or from another location. Unless you work at an airport, it’s simply a place where you board or depart a plane, or it’s a place where you go to drop someone off or pick someone up who is traveling by plane.

There are a few people in the world who view an airport differently. These people view the airport as their home.

Living at an airport is incredibly uncommon, but there are multiple people who have actually lived at airports for many years. Not all of these people are homeless. An airport isn’t simply an alternative to a homeless shelter. Sometimes the situation is more complicated. For example, take Iranian airpot dweller Mehran Karimi Nasseri. The 2004 movie “The Terminal” starring Tom Hanks was based on his story.

Nasseri lived in Terminal One of the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport for 18 years. He was a refugee who was denied entry into Britain and also denied entry into France. Thus, he was stuck at the airport. Nasseri lived at the airport until 2006 when he was hospitalized.

Over in China, a 60-year-old man named Wei Jianguo has lived in the Beijing Capital International Airport for 14 years. Unlike Nasseri, he is not a refugee and is not trapped in the airport because he’s denied entry into the country. No, Nasseri is simply choosing to live in the airport because he doesn’t want to live at home with his family.

Nasseri explained that his family wants him to stop drinking and smoking, but if he’s at the airport, he can drink and smoke as much as he wants. Nobody tells him he can’t. Some airport employees report that he is sometimes drunk and can get loud when he’s drunk, but otherwise, he’s harmless.

Nasseri is not homeless. He has a home about 12 miles from the airport. He just chooses not to go home. He will go home to get essential items if necessary, or he will leave the airport to go shopping. Those instances are rare. He prefers to stay in the waiting area of the airport, usually in terminal 2 but sometimes terminal 3.

Watch the video below to see how Nasseri manages to live at the airport and to hear him explain in his own words why he would rather live there than his own home.

Nasseri isn’t the only person living at the Beijing Capital International Airport. In 2018, at one time there were six people living at the airport.