Part 1.1 - To Sleep Or Not To Sleep

It's been more than 2 months since I last went on an out-of-town trip, and after my trip to Sagada was canceled, I wasn't able to come up with any weekend travel plans wherein my friends can come with me. However, as luck would have it, Richard, a friend I met in Instituto Cervantes de Manila, needed to go to his province in Bolinao, Pangasinan for the weekend and asked if I would like to come with him.

I've heard a lot of good things about Bolinao and have always wanted to go, so now that I'm being given the opportunity, I just had to say YES! When I asked Richard if it's okay to invite friends to tag along, he said it's fine. So I did, but only Jenny was free for the weekend. We traveled twice before already, so not bad, I guess.

After our shift ended Saturday morning, Jenny and I went straight to the Five Star bus terminal in Pasay (quite close to home) and took the 9:00AM trip. We were a bit worried since it started raining and we heard in the news that there's a typhoon approaching the southern part of the country. However, we're going northward, and Richard said it's pleasantly sunny in Bolinao (he went ahead the previous night), so we stopped worrying. And besides, it wasn't raining heavily.

As usual, I wanted to stay awake the entire trip. For me, the actual travel to get from one place to another is part of the whole experience, and I also enjoy watching the changing scenery from a jungle of concrete and heavy road traffic to distant mountains and wide-open rice fields under a clear-blue, pollution-free sky. However, my eyelids were having minds of their own, and my brain was starting to produce some incomprehensible ideas and visions, like me swimming like a pro once we get to Bolinao (I can't swim) or me poisoning Hanie with a hair dye (unlikely to happen since her body is so used to hair dyes by now, she dye-ing her hair every freaking week). Alas, I had to give in.

Exhausted from working the previous night, we slept through most of the trip. It was a dreamless sleep and an uncomfortable one because the air-con was in full blast. Thank goodness there wasn't any movie on, because most of the time they're awful anyway.

Moving right along...