Lansing to Jakarta: Reflections on a Three Day Flight
5 August 2014 6:56pm Lansing, MI
Three whole Tigers games will have taken place between the time that I leave this here airport and the time that I arrive in Jakarta. Tonight is David Price’s first game pitching for them. That would be a cool one to watch. I should be able to at least catch the highlights at O’Hare. I digress. This is going to be a very long series of flights. Four flights and five separate airports will I pass through. I don’t mind long flights, but this might push it. Right now I’m more just excited about flying to some new places, getting some legit sushi at the Tokyo airport, and having lots of time to do some reading I’ve been neglecting lately. The fact that I’m moving to a drastically different country where I don’t know anyone hasn’t much sank in.
5 August 2014 9:16pm Chicago, IL
Flight delay. I’m using the time to research blog sites and set one up. Svbtle.com seems like a good one. Apparently, they were invite only until January of this year. I also stumbled upon an article on Wendell Berry that featured a lot of his best quotes. I could go off for a while about several of them, but here’s one that’s especially fitting right now:
Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
In a lot of ways, it sums up where I’ve been at for most of the time from when I began seriously thinking I would do something crazy like move to the other side of the world to teach. Yes, I’m excited. Yes, I’m looking forward to the unique opportunities I’ll be presented with by doing this. Yes, I think it’s a good move for me now at this point in my life. But there hasn’t been the giddiness and near-uncontrollable anticipation that I’ve felt when preparing for previous trips abroad or even to new places in the US. It’s been a very sober and almost somber realization that I’m leaving behind all that is familiar and starting over in a new place that could hardly be more different than the American Midwest. Relationships I’ve invested in and gained a lot of joy from will be put on the backburner at best, and quite likely lost, in a lot of cases. I won’t be able to go to my favorite coffee shops in Minneapolis or go fishing up in Floodwood for a weekend or even come home to Michigan for Christmas for quite a while.
6 August 2014 11:07am San Francisco, CA
Well, I didn’t quite finish that last thought before I had to board the plane in Chicago. In the last 14 hours or so I read my Bill Bryson book, slept a couple hours, walked off of the plane and into a ghost town of a terminal in the wee hours of the morning, slept a couple more hours, took a train into San Francisco, drank some coffee while reading my Bible and watching the sun rise over the bay (that was just as pleasant as it sounds), ate breakfast, drank more coffee, took the
train back to the airport, and fielded a call from my mom. San Francisco is a really cool city. It’s dirtier than I expected, and the number of homeless people (easily more than anywhere else I’ve ever been) is sobering, but it’s got a pretty unique charm about it that would make it a great place to at least spend a few days exploring.
About that last thought I had that I didn’t finish: that’s not so much where my head is at right now, but it warrants more elaboration since it’s the reality of what I’m about to walk into. I was downright sad when I left Floodwood for the last time a few weekends ago. I have a lot of love for that place, my friends up there, and especially the Larva family. It was hard driving south on MN-73 (then back north ten minutes later because I forgot to return Matt’s fishing pole to him and then out of town again) knowing that it would likely be quite some time before I would get a chance to return.
Leaving Minneapolis a couple days later after sharing a meal of the best pizza anywhere (Crescent Moon in Northeast Minneapolis; you haven’t lived until you’ve had their halal meat lover’s football pizza) with my roommate and another one of my favorite people anywhere (Mike Hudy) wasn’t exactly something I was excited to do either. Minnesota has been home for me for the last four years. I graduated from college there. My first relationship(s) were there. I learned how to make chai the Somali way there. I went overseas for more than just a week or two long mission trip from there for the first time. It’s been a profoundly impactful four years and I’ve grown to really feel at home there. That said, all the familiarity with that state and the relationships I’ve built with people there don’t translate to any plans to move back in the future. I won’t rule it out, but I’ve got no intentions right now to return there permanently.
If the first half of why my enthusiasm for this move hasn’t been completely unchecked is that I’m leaving behind a familiarity that I’ve worked four years to achieve, the second is that I’m about to have to do the same thing all over again in a different locale. I’m about halfway across the Pacific now, having left the airport quite some time ago. I didn’t feel the need to start a new header. I don’t enjoy the superficial, small talk-laden part of building friendships with people. I like people, for the most part, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that if I’m in some kind of social situation with people I don’t really know that well it doesn’t take very long at all before the idea of going home and reading a book sounds really great.
One thing I think I kind of regret about how I went into my time at North Central is that I didn’t really make much of an effort socially. I got an apartment right away, found a job within the first few weeks, and confined my involvement with the North Central community to class and not much else. My thinking was that I had a lot of good friends from Master’s Commission, Floodwood, and back home in Michigan already, and that I didn’t need to go through all the work that I did in relationship-building at FMMC because I already had good friends. The problem is that I never really did become good friends with much of anybody at NCU and my friends from before that all live a long ways away and life keeps you busy enough that it’s pretty hard to get what you need relationally from those kind of friendships anyways.
I could, and am going to, view this as a fresh start in a good way in that sense. I’ll go against my own inclinations to only put out so much socially and work at having a sense of community in Jakarta. I’m kind of sick of going on about all of that and this whole thing is probably already long enough that no one will actually read this far. Props if you’re still with me.
There’s something rather pacifying about flying over the ocean and seeing the clouds and water leisurely move past. I also rather enjoy long flights when they’re not too crowded (this time I’ve got a whole row by a window to myself, score) and it’s a decent airline. Maybe it’s just because I’ve flown Spirit the last few times I’ve travelled by air anywhere (big mistake, don’t ever do it), but United ain’t bad. Comfy seats, a decent cabin crew, and a legitimately good cup of green tea at one point more than make up for a lousy meal highlighted (lowlighted?) by what has to be the worst rice ever served. Seriously, the whole crew and most of the passengers on this flight are Japanese and the flight itself terminates in Tokyo. I sure hope the sushi is better than that at the airport. That’s one of the things I was most looking forward to about this itinerary: the chance to eat some legit sushi at the Tokyo-Narita airport.
Continuing on the topic of random, unrelated thoughts, I also enjoy the experience of flying from one foreign city to another. It makes me feel like I’m really travelling the world when there’s not the obvious tie of either flying into or out of an American city. I finished my Bill Bryson book: The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way It was pretty interesting considering it was a book on the history of the English language. The last chapter I wanted to stand up and applaud. It was on the future of English, and specifically he talked about how big of a political push there’s been to legally make the US an English-only nation, while contrasting it with saying that our focus might be better served by trying harder to speak English well ourselves considering how far we’ve fallen in that regard. I could opine for a while on that topic, but I’ll save it. Three hours until landing.
8 August 2014. 2:23am. Jakarta, Indonesia
Indonesia is very much like India. At least that’s my take so far on the country. A lot about my initial impression and the first few hours I spent in each country are really similar. I guess you can’t spell Indonesia without India though, can you? That was dumb. I’m lacking sleep and it’s about time for bed. In Tokyo, I got my sushi, but it didn’t really taste any different than sushi I’ve had before in the US. Good, but a bit disappointing still. Based on the 4 hours in the airport I spent there, Japan in general was a bit interesting, definitely weird, and honestly a bit underwhelming. Coming into Jakarta, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time not preoccupied with either my book (started reading The Heavenly Man), a movie, talking to the girl next to me, or looking at the map and judging how far we’ve gotten. Arrival here was chaotic. So many lines did I have to stand in to get what I needed and get out. I got in trouble for taking a few pictures of the chaos while waiting in the line to exit the airport (apparently, you can’t do that?). Two security guys searched my bag and made me delete the pictures from my phone. Nothing more came of that, and I was on my way out of the airport. Here it goes.
