The Uncertain Future/ The Path I Walk Now

The path I walk through inside the school on my way in and out. All photos are taken inside the Ateneo de Manila University.

It’s all been one hell of a roller coaster ride.

It seemed as though it was just yesterday when I began attending review classes, sacrificing a month of my sweet summer time to prepare for the grueling college entrance exams I would partake of that same year. The same goes for my last high school year and the summer after graduation. Now, whenever I would look back to those days, I would always be struck with amazement.

From the beginning of the college entrance examinations to almost the last of my high school days, the future was very uncertain for me. A kind of panic and terror would engulf me when that uncertainty got the best of me and I would think of the infinite ‘what ifs’ I could encounter when the results were out. Rest assured, none of the what ifs ever happened and I sometimes laugh about it now.

The Foreign Exchange

Korean-pop CD’s neatly stacked next to the stereo, Korean lifestyle magazines topmost on the bookrack, Korean Channel M constantly airing on the television screen – it was my love for all things K- that have driven my feet, along with two of my friends’, to an unofficial ‘Koreatown’ in Jupiter Street, Makati City, (Philippines) one Thursday afternoon. And gosh, did I find my sweet haven.

Authentic restaurants and groceries lined the streets, giving the impression that you were not in a ‘Koreatown’, you were in Korea. Around the corner, however, taxi cabs race past flocks of Western foreigners in bars and cafés, chatting away nonchalantly with their fellow ‘aliens’ – you were at New York.

Amidst this entire culture clash, were the locals, adding up to the already chaotic mixture of people, a mixture that gave the area an unrecognizable quality, a familiar, yet foreign atmosphere. I then stretched the rest of the day exploring these streets as a tourist in my own country, camera hanging around my neck, enjoying the company of foreigners and locals alike. And I ended up being taught a lesson in the process.