Even the most ordinary can be viewed with a sense of awe and wonder, if one has the tourist’s eyes.

To the native of the place of course, everything is familiar, ordinary, commonplace, boring.

That same tourist when he goes home sees everything as banal. And that native will view everything in the tourist’s neighborhood as source of wonderment.

Who is right? The tourist or the native. I think they’re both right. They see two facets of one reality. If we can but see old things in new ways! If.

I’m the second person quoting your line. It is funny that being Filipino and having lived my entire life in these islands (save for the occasional trips abroad) I have always felt like a non-Asian (note: Oriental) amongst the other Asian countries around us. (Yes, ED, you are right. Being Pinoy, we do get mixed up ourselves as to our “Asian-ness”)

When in another country, people point to a Japanese, Korean, Thai or Chinese as Orientals but when it comes to me, I have never been asked if I were oriental. I’ve always been mistaken for either a Mexican or Latino with native American mixture thrown in. The funniest was when I was asked if I’m from Samoa. I even have to look at a map to find exactly where Samoa is. (bad geographic knowledge)

But the amazing thing is, many of my Caucasian friends who’ve come to visit our islands say they feel pretty much at home (take away the grime, pollution and helter-skelter urban nightmares and it would be perfect) . Maybe because of the way we treat our visitors. We’re a very hospitable people, sometimes to a fault. Maybe because we have a mixture of western culture thrown in our veins making us “relate” easier with others outside of the Asian sphere. Or maybe because we don’t look too “oriental” enough, like in my case I am “Samoan”. Whatever it is… my El Salvadoran friend who’s never heard of the Philippines before he visited here said, “I am so lost in your country. But it is a different kind of lost. It’s like being lost in your own home with the lights turned off. Turn on the light, and everything is familiar again.”

Well, yes - and no. I mean, if non-Filipinos (including other Asians) here still question whether Filipinos are Asian, Latino, Pacific Islander, or something else, this does suggest some significant degree of unfamiliarity.

(Hint to those who don’t know: we’re definitely Asian!)

Even Filipinos themselves get mixed up. Most are taught that Filipinos were descended from Malay groups that made their way up from the Malay peninsula, up through the archipelago now known as Indonesia, and then landed in the Philippines. However, archaeological and linguistic evidence suggest that the reverse happened. From present-day Taiwan, Austronesian (the language family represented by Tagalog, Malay, Hawaiian, etc.) speaking peoples made their way down to the PI, and then spread into the Malay-speaking world. And, of course, there was a lot of contact between these regions.

The Philippine Airlines (PAL) section of Aquino is renovated; the rest of the airport is not in great shape. And let me tell ya, even the premium cabins on PAL are pretty disappointing. But warmth does partially compensate for shabbiness.

There are only two places where I’ve experienced this extremely heartfelt feeling of finding an actual physical space to be “home”: the PI and Bali. Not even San Diego, the place where I was born and raised, felt like “home”.

A strange yet comforting notion, indeed.