It was our uncle and aunt’s fiftieth birthday (and apparently also their wedding anniversary celebration - all falling on the month of April). We were supposed to visit them the previous week, but most of us were unavailable and so we decided to change the date. Now that the day has finally arrived, we woke up, grabbed our prepared stuff and left home. Having descended the stairwell of our building and left the village, we hopped aboard the van at around three in the morning. Bags were packed and seats were chosen by each family member. As we left the avenue and drove towards our rather distant first stop, Taguig - where our cousins were supposed to wait for us – we greeted our driver, Mr. Jun from Fox Travel Services - our transportation service, and exchanged introductions. While the rest of the family was talking, I was trying to regain a few more winks of sleep. Finally realizing that the bumpy road and noisy chatter lead me to inevitable failure, I finally gave up trying to sleep. The motion and inertia brought about by the vehicle weren’t helping either.
As we moved on, pointless chatter still went on and I was hopelessly trying to refrain from saying anything impolite. You know how grumpy a person can be without having enough sleep, right? My dad convinced me to transfer seats since according to him and his ego I could catch their “stupidity”, but I refused since if I did I would just become more vexed. With that in mind, I just transferred to the next seat, still in the same row at the back, and watched the passing surroundings through the window. I also checked the time on my phone every now and then.
After a few hours our cousin ate Jennifer, along with her companion, were the next ones to join the van. A few kilometres later, in our point of view were now our aunt and the rest of our cousins. The van was now packed with people, who were surprisingly cheerful even at such an early time of the day. My mom wanted my aunt to sit beside me near the back end of the van. With that, we went onwards to our real destination – to the province of Pangasinan.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
