I arrived in Rome fully aware that I would suffer from excess. Too much art, too much history, too much evidence of human genius compressed into a single city. You cannot walk ten minutes here without colliding with a basilica ceiling or a Renaissance façade. So, I prepared myself for saturation. Still, preparation is a fragile defense.
I woke at half past eight to a Rome that had decided, against all meteorological pessimism, to be radiant. The forecast had threatened days of rain: gray and somber skies, sodden stones, and a city in mourning. But instead, there was a sharp blue firmament and an eight-degree chill that made the light feel earned. From my window, the sun struck the terracotta roofs and ochre walls with a kind of absolution. Breakfast downstairs was as perfunctory as the reviews had warned: a limp croissant, indifferent coffee, hospitality by obligation. Still, it was free, and I have never trusted a man who travels for breakfast.
Rome, like most obsessions, began long before I arrived. It began in Manila, in the comfortable tyranny of routine, where I booked a ticket last Christmas on a whim. It was an impulsive act disguised as foresight. I avoided traveling to Rome during my birthday month; August in Rome seemed an unnecessary test of endurance—heat, crowds, the theatrical exhaustion of peak season. February felt more appropriate.
The journey was a distance exercise. Three hours to Singapore. Five hours of waiting beneath the polite efficiency of Changi Airport. then thirteen hours were suspended between time zones, meals served and cleared, cabin lights dimmed and revived while crossing different land masses and seas. Travel, at that length, becomes less about movement and more about surrender. By the time we descended into Fiumicino, I felt neither triumphant nor romantic. I was only aware of the miles behind me.
2025 was a year that, on the surface, looked full. Full in the way social calendars and passport pages like to measure things. There were stamps on my passport—and I’m genuinely running out of pages—new cities and countries, long walks through unfamiliar streets, and conversations with people who once existed only as names on a screen or voices over a frequency. I crossed borders with ease, stepped into cultures not my own, and kept saying yes to learning, even when it was uncomfortable.
I hate to admit it, but I once carried some quiet prejudices about China. The kind you don’t announce out loud, but let settle somewhere in the back of your mind. They were shaped by headlines, by political noise, by narratives repeated often enough to feel convincing. And yes, by a few past encounters that lingered in memory longer than they should have. Travel, however, has a way of humbling you. It confronts your assumptions without ceremony and leaves you no choice but to look closer.
Autumn has always felt like a gentle exhale. Not an ending, not quite a beginning—just a pause long enough to notice your own breathing. It’s the season that gives permission to slow down, to move deliberately, to finally wrap myself in the thick wool sweaters and coats that spend most of the year untouched in the perpetual heat of home. There is comfort in that weight, in fabric meant to protect rather than perform. It signals a shift, subtle but undeniable, away from endurance and toward intention.
What was supposed to be a simple two-and-a-half-hour train ride stretched into a weary four-hour crawl to Maastricht. The day before, a train accident had disrupted the line, and what began as a mild inconvenience slowly turned into a quiet lesson in surrender—the kind travel often insists we learn, whether we’re ready or not. Platforms blurred into one another, updates came and went without certainty, and the illusion of a neat schedule dissolved somewhere between stations.
Traveling around Europe, especially within the Schengen Zone, has a certain fluidity to it. Borders blur into railway tracks and bus routes; a new country is often just a few hours away, announced not by checkpoints but by subtle changes in language, architecture, and rhythm. Movement here feels effortless, almost taken for granted. On one of my rare free days in Amsterdam, with no meetings to rush to and no agendas to defend, I decided to take the train south to Antwerp—a city near the Dutch border that has long stood as one of Europe’s vital crossroads for trade, shipping, and learning.
