Outsiders in our own home

An 8 hour rocky trip back home makes me do something that I don't really do even in the context of the word sometimes. That is to think and feel outside logic and facts and just let my emotion affect my thinking or even say run the way I think.

Soon enough I will see those people so dear to me. My family who managed to be together and put this occasion above all else. How I miss them I don't get to see them as often as I want to except for my brother who now lives in china.I really miss them.

One more thing that I miss is the place where I grew up, it's been a year since I visited Sagada and that was the same occasion last year. As we come closer to my birth place memories of my childhood comes back like a flash back in a movie.

When I was young I cant wait to move out from this place and move to the city. It has been my prayer almost every night, when it finally happened it was the happiest moment and I cant even sleep a week before my dad drives me to Baguio where my university is located. The day I leave I look back and I promised my self I will never come back to this boring place except for a visit. That thinking changed after 12 years of studying and working. The more I try my best to cope up with the fast life in the city and to meet the expectations and demands at work the more I miss the simple life back home. If I go to groceries and buy fruits it makes me cry because how come am I buying things that are free back home, I work so hard in this city just to buy something that I can get for free. When I walk at the mall and see kids that are playing at a paid play yard it makes me feel how come these kids have to pay per hour to play while this is something kids back home can get as much as they want in a wide open space for free. I have no regrets setting my goal but I regret promising my self not to come back to this place because that promise became a curse.

We arrive at Sagada and I saw a lot of foreigners taking pictures of the hanging coffin and I can say in their face how amazed they are. I went to the yogurt house with my friends who happen to be home too and its pack with foreigners. Most of them think we are tourist as well and shocked when we say we are locals. Sure we do look different from most of the locals but we know and can see and the locals too can see that we belong there. (well I guess we can just smell out own kind). We talked to them and they tell us how lucky of us to me in such beautiful, mysterious place, things that when we hear it before we often frowned but this time we agree and this times it makes us feel like we are just like them, we are strangers in our own home.