traveling alone, looking for directions

The flight was fourteen hours, a good reminiscing of how it was last year when there were seven of us. Had they, or even just anyone of them, traveled with me this time, it would have been more enjoyable and nostalgic. I had seen plenty of incidents from the NAIA to the last day in Europe which were so amusing. I had to stop myself from chuckling out loud alone. There was no one I could share with some realization or observation in Ilonggo. There were my foreign project partners and friends, but they would hardly get the pun of jokes we shared and understood only in the Philippines.

But still, I enjoyed traveling alone. It was empowering to go through the airport checks, the right platforms at the train stations, and finding my way around on my own. As long as one knows how to read and speak English, there’s nothing to worry about, really. The airports there were even easier to navigate around in, compared to our own domestic airports. There was no way to get lost at, for example, the huge Schipol Airport in the Netherlands, because there were directional signs everywhere: to the terminals, the restrooms, the bars and casinos, the meditation center. In Philippine airports, it’s always a guessing game, and the crew always assumes that we know.