Back at it!

I've always confidently and shockingly informed everyone back home that the jaunt to Indonesia lasts a grueling 30 hours. That seemed pretty realistic. Of course, it's difficult to estimate the true time when the entire trip is a half-conscious, heavy-eyed haze. Studying one's flight itinerary is not much help either. With no way to reasonably expect fewer than three layovers on three drastically different parts of the planet, one would need a time-zone map, a protractor, and a slide rule to get accurate information from a North West Airlines internet printout. So, I decided that on the morning of July 23rd, I would simply strap on a good old fashion analogue wrist watch to keep track of my travel time before arriving in Jakarta on the afternoon of the 25th. Granted, I got the cheapest flight I could, which included a 14 hour layover in Singapore, so I knew the actual time in between leaving my house and getting to a hotel on Jaksa Street would comprise of more than than just air time. However, I truly believed that crossing the mystical International Dateline would significantly make up for the artificial two-and-a-half day gap in between my port of embarkation in the US and the Soekarno-Hatta Airport just outside of Jakarta. Consequently, when glancing at the time, nearing the end of my odyssey, I gasped (well, likely yawned) in a sleepy stupor when realizing just how many times the hour hand had circumnavigated the face of my indonesian, counterfeit Fossil Watch. Well into my 50th hour of travel, I found my self, still standing, finally on the last leg of the journey, talking to a loquacious german fellow, in a familiar, over-crowed un-air-conditioned airport bus, headed toward the city center.

My exhaustion, however, was immediately counteracted by marveling, once again, at the wildly weaving traffic on the spaghetti streets of Jakarta, skyscrapers towering over makeshift huts constructed out of bamboo and scrap sheet-metal, ever-smiling indonesian faces, the statue of Monas, and a hole-in-the-wall, all inclusive convenience store, a little gem that a couple friends and I accidentally stumbled upon during our first visit to this dynamic city. I could not help but get choked up at the flooding memories of this place, which defined fun for me during all my travels in the previous year. Jakarta is a city of character. It's loud, it smells awful, it's impossible to navigate, it's dirty, it's dangerous, but at the same time, it offers so much solitude and allows one to unwind in the most unlikely of environments, in a country where a 5am call to prayer awakens the majority of it's residents every day of every week.

Jumping right back into the swing of things and speaking Indonesian even more fluently than a month ago when I left here, Jakarta has already filled me with an unparalleled excitement and anticipation for the upcoming year. I've already made a great friend from germany, who I will see again next month when he visits Medan (where I'll be living this time around); I've begun rekindling the relationships that I temporarily left behind during the month of July, and I've already got a shiny new, hot pink indo-phone, which will provide me with scarce internet time during the inevitable stretches of prolonged waiting I'm going to be doing over the next many months in the midst of this laid-back culture.

Mixed with these euphoric feelings, though, are ones of slight confusion and of blinding nostalgia. Firstly, I can't help but already miss my friend Jon, another Fulbrighter who, over the course of the year, became pretty much my exclusive travel companion and one of the best friends I've ever had. It will certainly be different this year, not being able to easily talk with someone who I can relate to so well and who is on the exact same level of understanding this culture. I'll have to wait quite a few months for all the new grantees to find their respective grooves before I can genuinely start making the jokes I want to make and before I'll be able to unwind and talk with someone who fully understands what I'm going through. This is much different for me than last year because each grantee was in the same boat, all dumped into a foreign country, having fun figuring things out together. Even though I'll have a year of previous experience, in many ways I'll have to be much more independent than before. Secondly, I have very freshly on my mind all the things I miss about home. I fully appreciated spending time with my family more than I ever had before, and seeing my best friends again was refreshing, productive, and just terribly fun. There are a great deal of people with whom I want to share this unique time in my life, but with whom I'll just have to settle for infrequent phone conversations and with limited e-mail.

Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel that Indonesia, which I chose to live in virtually by throwing a dart at a map, has become the place where I truly belong at this point in my life. I doubt if I'll always feel like that, but the circumstances under which I am staying here are so incredibly ideal, it's impossible for me to imagine any other alternative that would have even closely stacked up. This place has allowed me to set a bar for happiness that I may not have otherwise known, and I will not settle for much less in the future. This certainly doesn't mean I'll always live here, but I know so much more about myself and what motivates me (no matter where I'll end up), and I could have never fully known these things if had I not made the fleeting decision to go to this mystifying part of the world. I owe a great deal to the Fulbright program, and I'm gleaming at taking advantage of what it has given me... again.

Let's just keep our fingers crossed that this year E. Coli bacteria won't find itself living in the completely WRONG part of my body... again, as well.