...i hate ian wright...

I hate Ian Wright!

Well, not actually. Seeing him on the tele today made me want to be in his shoes. His usual stints in Globe Trekker really make me so envious. Today, he was in Austria, home of Beethoven, Mozart, Freud and Schwarzenegger, dancing The Waltz in a grand ball inside some Austrian Castle at the foot of the Alps. And he gets paid to do all those wonderful things.

I love traveling, and I could probably be the greatest advocate of the scarred saying “life is a journey, not a destination.” I realize that all of the trips I had were made interesting by the travel going there, and not entirely of what I will find when I get there.

I had been fortunate enough to have gone to several places around our country. I’ve been in the far north, and to the even farther south. I have immersed myself in different Filipino cultures, eaten different local food, conversed with (though with much difficulties) different regional tongues, and gotten drunk from different provincial liquors. I had also been to several neighboring countries, like Singapore, Australia, Taiwan and China. I’ve been into totally different cultures, and learned quite a few new ones. But the need to travel and explore some more is like a cancer in me, growing with every moment that I stay idle.

And Ian Wright isn’t doing me any good.

Oftentimes I would think that I’d be very happy with a job like his, albeit very tired of course. When I was young, I would watch airplanes taking off from the nearby international airport. And I would memorize their decals on their bodies, and imagine them landing on their destinations. In a matter of hours they’d be in another country, another continent. As a young child, I created this dream that I would travel the world, sans 88 days. Whenever planes are landing, I would envy them for coming from another country, another continent. Someday, I will live out my dream. And I would take Emily with me. She would love it, I know, perhaps even more than I would.

And maybe then, I wouldn’t have to hate Ian Wright so much.