I recall the warm tropical breeze brushing my face like a feather as I rode my bike down the gravelled pathway to my house. My bronzed skin soaked up the equatorial moonlight like a sponge under a faucet of scintillating holy water. The only sounds of the night were the crunching gravel under the tyres of my bike and the clicking of its chain ring, accompanied by the occasional squall of a lonely tom cat hidden among the tropical foliage. Sparrows and hornbills cocked their heads at me from their perches on murmuring power lines, and the noxious fluid swirling through the gutters on either side of the road sounded like bubbling brooks singing through the nocturne. But the clandestine scene lasted only a fleeting five minutes because the local mosque began to scream and wail demands for the people of the neighborhood to come to prayer. In a jiffy, the birds squawked and left their electrical jungles, all of the quiet tomcats joined the occasional wailer, and the happy stream turned into a acrid gutter of refuse. I decided to call it a night.

However, when I reached my house, more noise stole its way through the cracks between the red bricks that my house was made of. The tumult of whining kettles, clattering pots and pans, and Indonesian gibberish ensued from every direction. I strained my eyes hard at the radon hands of my analog clock to figure out that it was 4:30 in the morning. If my neighbors hadn’t been feeling as festive or adrenalized as usual, I might have been able to fall asleep by 5:00. However, from the way it sounded, they had been extra hungry that night.

The next morning I woke up and ate a large breakfast of buttermilk pancakes and papaya. I nearly gloated over the fact that my religion allowed me to eat whenever I wanted while 99 percent of my city was forced to fast from food and water until two in the morning. They would then be allowed to feast until sunrise, but until two, the inhabitants of Bandung would move lethargically and speak lazily to conserve energy and avoid migraines. Ramadan was always an interesting time and every August, or September,(it varied with the lunar calendar), seemed different than the last one.

At the end of Ramadan, local shops and markets would be depleted of all the food they owned by morning, and a restock was needed by noon. Tall bamboo poles, some up to 30 feet high, would be hoisted upright in open places and slathered with motor oil and grease. Atop the pole would be a cache of treats and prizes, an arm’s length away from the pole, dangling on a halo of wicker. To reach the prizes, teams of men and boys would stack up on each others’ shoulders so that the lucky person on the top could reach for the victory that he would share with his human ladder. I never actually grabbed the prizes, but I was on most occasions the one who held the victor on his shoulders at the top of the pinnacle. However, I didn’t join the fun in the same way as the locals. I would stand back and listen to their twohunnitmileanhour phrases being hit back and forth like a ball at Wimbledon. My friends didn’t understand it either. We contented ourselves with speaking twohunnitmileanhour English and this served us well.

I often felt out of place in that society. A society where life is the sun, the heat, the market, and the crescent moons towering over every neighborhood of twisting dirt roads. When I was trapped in my thoughts, I would pause in front of the mosque. Heads capped with takiyahs periodically bobbed up and down, almost touching the floor at the bottoms of their cycles. The sight was interesting, but a ten-year-old kid wearing sandals and a Fourth of July t-shirt gawking at the doorway was definitely not a welcome visitor. The culture was friendly and tightly-knit, perhaps too tightly-knit for an American kid with limited Indonesian vocabulary. I would shoot hoops in my driveway while the other kids on my street would throw incomprehensible local slurs at each other while playing soccer in the road. I didn’t look Indonesian. I didn’t pray at the mosque. Everywhere I went, I was different and I felt it by the way I was treated like a tourist. Cultural isolation blanketed me like the ever present haze.

However, I eventually realized my mistake. My mistake was misunderstanding the culture. I thought of the culture as exclusive and wary of outsiders. I had lived there for twelve years, and although I spoke Indonesian fairly well and did the things they usually did, I was still different in nature. I gradually learned that this deviation from the culture was inevitable, and that I would have to change my approach on interaction with the people. This difference will be present at least a small degree in every expat’s life, and I know first-hand that it can be tiresome, lonely, and frankly, slightly annoying. But we are who we are, and we have to compensate for that, which is why I tell you that the loneliness can be overcome and that expats can thrive in foreign cultures with enough effort and willpower.