My Humble Home

I was surfing the boob tube when I chanced upon this travel show in TV 5, Travel on a Shoestring. I got interested when the host, from the very start of the show, mentioned how there are lots of places that one can go to with a budget of just under five thousand bucks.

Being the cheapskate that I sometimes purport myself to be, I decided to give the show a chance to wow me. And wowed was I when I realized the place they were doing a review on was my one and only hometown, San Pablo City.

It's so weird watching a review of my own hometown. For one, it makes me think why, despite my 17 years in San Pablo, I haven't been to all of those places that they went to. For another, none of any of those featured in TV seem to be the way they really are in real life.

For instance, the inn that the host stayed in for two nights is just across the grade school that I went to. And despite studying in that place for nine years, not once have I seen how it looks like inside. My impression of the place has always been one that is frequented by people of questionable professions. I was surprised, greatly I might add, to discover how homey it is inside and not at all what I thought it was. Imagine me going to and from that place for nine years bearing in mind a specific notion of the place, only to know now how wrong I have been all the while. Talk about not knowing what you have when you have it. Geez.

But on another angle, the supposedly nice sceneries that they went to are not that pleasing at all. Not to put my hometown down, but Sampaloc Lake, for instance, long lost its luster and charm, at least in my eyes. It's no longer as pristine as it used to be. The people living around it, the "villagers" as the host of the show called them, has contributed much, very much, to the lake's decline. Even the air that the host of the show so intently complimented isn't as good as it seems to be. Now, the lake (or more precisely, the circumference of the lake) only serves as a jogging path for me on those few occasions when I go home. Bummer, right?

But whatever was said about the places in my hometown, however it was depicted in the show, good or bad, San Pablo City still remains a special place to me. If Ateneo were the one that ushered me into adulthood, it is San Pablo that built the foundations of my life. There, I learned the meaning of morality. There, my values were formed.

Even as I have now physically left the place, even if I now would feel no one but a stranger in those places that I have grown up in, San Pablo will forever be etched in my mind and in my heart as that place that first molded me into who I am now.

It will forever be my home.

My first humble home.