I thought with the current technology, people will not talk with strangers anymore because they are “too busy” doing something with their smartphone. But, I was wrong.

Just yesterday, I had a flight from Yogyakarta to Jakarta. In case you don’t know, both are big cities in Java Island, Indonesia. Indonesia consists of a lot of islands. There are about 17,000 islands (yes, that many). There are five main islands, including Java. Back to the story, I arrived at Adisucipto International Airport (-red airport in Yogyakarta) an hour an half before boarding time. Yes, it’s too early. My parents taught me to arrive at the airport at least one hour before boarding time so that we won’t miss the flight. It’s always better to wait at the airport than caught off in the traffic. We also have plenty time to enjoy the airport facility. My 3 year old son was very excited to see planes took off and fly.

Unfortunately, my flight was 1,5 hour delayed due to bad weather. So, I had to wait for 3 hours! That’s too long. Well, apparently my son didn’t think so, he just keep running around happily. I took turn taking care my son (read: running around airport) with my husband. When it’s my husband turn, I was bored. I turned off my phone because I was having a headache, looking at my phone just making it worse. So, I looked around. There is  a woman sat in front of me, she’s about 40 years old and looked friendly. I tried to chat with her. We talked about few things for about 15-20 minutes. It’s a quite long conversation considering we’re strangers. A few seats beside me, there’s an old woman talking to a woman in front of her. I could hear them, and it seemed like they’re strangers. Then I looked around again. As I predicted, most of them were looking at their phone or laptop/notebook. But, there were still a few people talking to another person.

Thanks to my headache, I was having fun talking to a nice stranger. I also found out “prove” that human interaction is not dead because of technology. Sometimes we just need to look around.