Last month, for an entire month, our family went on an amazing trip to the Philippines. Traveling far and wide with my family is a dream/goal/priority of mine, and we always knew that we wanted our girls’ first international experience to be to the Philippines because I was born an American, but my heritage is 100% Filipino. We based ourselves in Manila, and from there took day trips and side trips to smaller islands and Singapore. My parents, my sister, and my aunt, all made the trip from the States as well; and we also had the opportunity to spend time with family who live in the Philippines and Singapore. It was a rich experience on so many levels that I have found myself at a loss to write or even talk about it in a way that I feel does it justice. When asked, “how was it?” I get wide eyed, pause, and say, “Great!”
And it was great. But so much more, too.
We were for the most part disconnected from all our usual modes of connectedness. As much as anything else I enjoyed giving ourselves permission not to keep up with everything, and everybody, all the time. My biggest concession to this was Instagram. If you’re on there, you can find me and my iPhone photos as jenmenphoto. Many are under the hashtag #mendozastakemanila.
Of course, I also have many many photos to go through and edit. I hope to share some here, along with some of my thoughts about our experience; but home and work life impede so quickly. Already I struggle to steal the time. Forgive me if months from now I am still sharing images and impressions from our trip.
For now, here’s just this one image. Other than changing the format, it is unedited. It may seem curious to go to The Other Side of The World (this is how we’ve referred to this trip for the past year that we’ve been talking about it with the kids) and come back with a photo of water. I guess this is my visual version of “Great!”
Beautiful, energetic, peaceful, familiar, enigmatic, simple, complex, delicious, dangerous, and colorful. All words that this image evokes in me, and that also begin to describe my impressions of the Philippines.