24 hours and explore

I can now enjoy a new city and consider it "checked" within 24 hours. Any longer than that, I get homesicklikeness, the feeling where I just want to leave and go somewhere else. Today, I'm so homesicklike; my flight to SF got canceled because we hit a bird. Yeah. The 747 was about to take off when we hit a pelican followed abruptly by the pilot hitting the brakes so hard while announcing to the panic of everyone "Remain in your seats, remain in your seats!" I thought I was finally getting into a real adventure, but alas not quite the one I imagined. Now here I am in a hotel close to the airport but miles from the city centre thinking about what I could have done with the day. But hey it could've been worse, at least I'm booked at a 4 star hotel tonight.

Tonight at the bar, I was chatting with some of the other stranded travelers. There's Rachel who is now working with the government as a foreign service employee and there's Joe who is a real estate broker visiting his children in Au. The topic of where home-home was came up and all of us couldn't decide where home was/is anymore. We defined it as the place where you feel at home and with that criteria, sadly for me it's no longer the Philippines, but it's San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Which led me to think about my recent naturalization - did I betray the Philippines now that I'm a US citizen? In a way I did. But does that make me any more criminal than the others who left it too? The way I see it, I just have a different role now. I still want to help out sure, but for now I actually see myself more as a global citizen having seen so much of the world, unavoidably feeling responsible for it.

Someday, I wish to understand the collective and distinctive attributes of humans. Will it really matter whose citizen you are anymore? Don't we all fight to afford the same rights and privileges to live? Oh, what I would do to take those rights and privileges to the ends of this world... but for now let me just take a picture.


Greetings from Manly Beach, Australia. Named because this man was there :)