Jumping Continents and Cultures: The Airport Experience

I was expecting my flight from Townsville to Sydney to be me, sitting next to some stranger, in a fit of narcoleptic crying…I ended up falling asleep, with my aviators on, before we even took off. I woke up on our descent into Sydney airport. I spent the afternoon and evening with my friend Lucy and her family. It was a strange feeling – in some ways I almost felt like I was returning home, to familiarity. I had been to Sydney over lecture recess and in many ways it was good to get back there, especially after my emotional departure from Townsville.

My flight the following morning to Jakarta on Garuda Flight 713 was like any international flight. I spent the first few hours of the seven hour flight catching up on some much needed sleep. My flight was my first exposure to the Indonesian language. Not going to lie, when spoken it sounds rather intense. When I woke up I watched Invictus (such a good movie!), had a really good lunch and wrote in my journal for almost two and half hours.

When I finally landed in Jakarta International Airport I landed in a dream – a hazy city of which all I knew about it came from news articles and media reports; I was walking into a dream, some mythical place that you can read about in encyclopedia’s but never really imagine witnessing it in person. That is my ongoing view towards Jakarta. I was herded out of the plane, down some stairs and onto a bus filled to capacity. The bus taxied through the airfield to the main terminal where I sort of just through myself into the river of people into the lines reading “immigration and foreign”. There were people of every color, race, height, stature, socio-economic status, dress and religion queued to enter Indonesia; and there I was, the six-foot-one, white American attempting to hide the front of my passport. For the first time in my life I was a minority…a noticeable minority.

Getting through customs, passing security and collecting my bags were relatively simple tasks given the language barrier and my general confusion. I felt as though I had literally walked from the sophisticated feeling of Sydney to a modern-day version of Disney’s Aladdin that is Jakarta. Because the other students flying in from the States weren’t scheduled to arrive for another two hours after me I was met by some men from the internship program. Think of an American airport pick-up terminal and then think of the complete opposite of that –that is where I found myself, perched on a tiny pipe running near the floor next to a wall of windows waiting for the Americans. Never before did I feel so out of place…I had little children literally starring at me like I was a circus act, tugging on their mother’s garments to get their attention –the mothers pulled them along but only after stealing a long glance at the pale foreigner. What an eye-opening experience.