Travel Story 1: Seeing Boracay With New Eyes

One of the things that I love most about traveling is that you get to see and experience new things and even if you've been to a place several times, you can always see it through different eyes because you're a different person every time you go there.

I've been to Boracay probably more than any other place here in the Philippines. I've gotten pretty blase about it, even though I still enjoy going there. This trip,half of us have never been and the other three have been there but it's been a long time since then. And so you could say I was the most Boracay-ed person in our group.

What I remember most from this trip is the discreet pleasure of seeing their faces light up as they beheld the glory of the beach, the sand, the water, the sunset, and all the things that people originally loved about this place. My heart "lit up" when I heard the sighs of contentment as they tasted almost all of my favorite food in this gastronomic paradise. My eyes were opened once again to things that I took for granted about this cleaner, more organized, still crowded but always glorious place.

Sans all the commercialization and closure issues, Boracay is still dear to my heart and to have shown it off in a sense to my friends is one experience I will treasure.

So the travel lesson here is: Open your eyes to things that can still be discovered and re-discovered about familiar places. It may not always be a place as beautiful or as "far" as this, but there are always new things or lessons that you can find, even if it's through the eyes of other people.

On a side note, I wasn't in a good place emotionally for the past few days and even several times during this trip. You have to look for the small and big balms to your soul that are just waiting around the corner for you. It hasn't made everything okay, but I will always look back at this trip with fondness and joy and a reminder that things will be okay.