0 Startin' the Year Foggy in Tagaytay

Date: January 1, 2013

2013 makes me feel old. Other turns of the year have never made me feel so, well, old. It's not the year per se really, it's the age I'm turning to this year. And along with the sinking feeling of helplessness of growing old and the inevitability of death (morbid, right?) is the realization that my steps now have to calculated and my plans well thought out. You know, things that real grown ups do.

Commuted to and in Tagaytay. A first for all of us. 

So when Lois, my college roommate, proposed that we skip sleep on New Year's eve, skip town without renting a car, and catch the first sunrise of 2013 in Tagaytay, I did the adult thing and without hesitation... said yes.

Peoples Park at 8:00 A.M. 'Didn't know Tagaytay could get this cold and foggy. 

Forever 16 when we're together. :D Photo by David C. Lim

So, I said yes to leaving Manila at 4:30 a.m. with no sleep and to taking public transportation. As it turned out, I also said yes to getting on four different vehicles to reach Tagaytay and totally missing the sunrise because of the amount of time it took us to get there (so that's what happens when no research is done prior to trying out something new), and then realizing later that I didn't care that things didn't pan out the way we originally wanted them to.

Nope, 'didn't care that it took us almost four hours to reach Tagaytay; 'didn't care that when we got to People's Park it was too foggy and the Taal Lake could not be seen at all; 'didn't care that we were  in Tagaytay only four hours so the time it took us to travel to and from was longer than our stay.  I did care though that the food we ordered at the renowned Bag of Beans wasn't worth our money (but that's another entry).

Maybe that's the beauty of travelling spontaneously. No research, no brain cells, no expectations, no disappointment. Or is it the beauty of doing things when you lack sleep? Dead brain cells, dead to the world, and in no position to care. Hey, Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway had alcohol, we have sleep-deprivation. Right. All I ever get to when I'm sleep-deprived are incoherent utterances that do not rise to the level of being right or wrong. Like Brad Pitt.

Of course, this post won't be complete without me going off topic, so I'll tell you that while Grace and I were watching the first installment of the "The Hobbit," the screen froze about an hour and a half into the movie. Of course, it surprised everyone but because it is a five-day long movie,  everyone in the cinema just considered it a welcome break, I think. We didn't hear grunts and complaints until after 10 minutes when there were no announcements and the the screen still didn't budge (yay SM Cinemas!).

This was David's first trip to Tagaytay and he didn't even get a decent view of the lake because of the fog. 'More for next time. :) 

I talk about "The Hobbit" because while watching it, I realized two things:

1. Hobbits hoard food as if in preparation for a zombie apocalypse, and
2. Unlike elves, we don't live forever. And it makes me a bit emo that there are so many things to see on middle earth, yet we don't have enough time to see even a fraction of them. Ah, nothing like ageless Elrond and Galadriel to remind us of life's transience.