Wanderlusting

All I could see were two bright hazel eyes glaring down at me from in between the wall of thick black cloth, in which my neighbor was always cloaked. We passed each other each day on my walk home from school along Albemarle Road, a street filled with the smells of fresh brick oven pizza and the sounds of blaring bass rich Cuban salsa. I wondered in my eight year old mind why this woman dressed like that, what the men in the pizzeria were saying with animated hands in their unfamiliar tongue and how the Cuban women learned to spin and dance in such tall shoes.

Each day of my New York City childhood thrilled me with such glimpses into faraway lands. As I grew up, however, these fleeting peaks into new cultures satisfied me less and less, and I knew I had to make the journey into the unknown.

"Selamat Datang", was the first of the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, that I learned as I gazed up in awe at the welcome in Jakarta, Indonesia’s international airport. The waiting area for my connecting flight was open air, but still managed to be smoky given the popularity of the habit, which I later came to believe was more of a pastime given the amount Indonesians engaged incessantly in the activity.

I wandered around the Soekarno-Hatta airport observing the waiting women in colorful head scarves and the men washing their feet before entering the terminal "masjid" to complete their afternoon prayers.

Over the course of the year that I spent in Central Java, Indonesia, I journeyed into the unknown everyday that I left my home on the back of a motorbike speeding down the rice paddy lined ‘city’ roads, ate fried rice at a local "warung" where the dish’s main ingredient came straight from the hen ten feet away from the table and practiced my Bahasa Indonesia while sitting in the waiting room of the local acupuncturist.

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world and the sixteenth largest geographically. Thus, even a year of exploration did not suffice to make this magical land a known one. Of course, I learned my way around, picked up the local language and saw many of the nation’s islands, but it seemed it would take more than one lifetime to know the 17,508 islands and pick up each of the 6,000 inhabited ones’ local dialects. Despite Indo’s daunting size and my increasing interest to explore more countries of Asia, I never felt discouraged. Instead, I felt thrilled that there would always be a journey into the unknown available to me. Whether I traveled back to a new island in Indonesia, to an unexplored East Asian country or even to a new ethnic pocket in Astoria, Queens in New York City, the journey always awaits me.