We sit in this bus leaving Jakarta, listening to Bryan Adams, remembering summers (American summers) and the lyrics to Summer of '69. We are smiles and laughter and nostalgia, comfortable with each other for one of the first times. The air is cool and conditioned as we speed down the road in our cased environment, tinted windows framed by starched lace and pleated curtains separating us from the outside.

"Back in the summer of '69!" we scream along with the music video showing faces and pictures of our world: Bryan Adams Live and white faces like ours mouthing the words with eyes pinched shut, heads and arms rocking back and forth. Oh, the memories! We sing them and feel a passion rising within us like an incoming wave, crashing down again and again with the chorus, "Back in the summer of '69!"

I glance, by chance, outside and feel, like a punch in the gut, the desparity: Dirty, brown, and dusty, the city, rivers, and people. Trash, the grass at their borders, banks and feet. I reach out to touch the dry brown of one tree but feel only the clammy smoothness of the tinted window. I pull back my hand, leaving three fingerprints on the window. My eyes focus on the three blotches, seeing at the same time the dusty city flow beneath, up and down, jostling, diving as bus tires meet potholes.

Why am I here? Why did I come? To touch a world that is not my own. To see and experience that which is different and unfamiliar. But I find that when I do, I am disgusted. Spit from toothless, smoking mouths. Ranking garbage soaked with river. Slimy licks from hairless dogs covered with open bloody sores. I see this, smell this, feel this and rear back in contempt, longing to get away, to go back to the familiar. That is the place where I am the most comfortable--the only place it seems I can find myself enough to think about everything I am seeing.

So now, back in the familiar, I sit atop a reclining, shock-resistant seat and do not feel the bumps. But here, too, I am disgusted not with what I see but who I am--a spoiled rotten American white girl. And while it sickens me I cannot escape from it. And so all the reasons I came here, press themselves against the clammy insides of my white American skin unable to get out, mere blotches bouncing around on the inside window of a tourist bus.