I know I said I would only be leaving you for a bit. And I have a very valid reason on why I ended up falling asleep anyway. So after we went down for dinner, I had a huge sigh of relief because there wasn't anyone left other than my mom's older brother, his wife, and their two kids. I felt less uncomfortable with the conversation going on because there were fewer people and they weren't asking me questions.

It was awkward though. Even though they were my cousins, I only saw them twice in my life and they are so much older than me. The eldest was twenty and the other one was seventeen. So instead of trying to socialize, I just picked off the peas from my chicken afritada. After dinner, we watched a couple of movies that my mom's younger brother had.

We were all tired and wanted to go to sleep afterward. We all wanted to be in separate beds and sleep until noon. All of the excitement had worn us all out. But the universe had different thoughts. All six of us slept in one room with only blankets and two queen-sized foams. We were all on the floor kicking and tugging each other's blankets. I couldn't sleep a wink. I thought about standing up and opening the lights to write on you, but everyone else was fast asleep and I didn't want to wake them up. I know very well that they're very much tired. So there I was, looking at the ceiling, in the dark with only a street lamp as a source of light.

I didn't remember sleeping but I knew it was pretty late. Our whole family is used to waking up around 9 whenever we don't have school or work, but apparently, grandma didn't know that. She woke us all up at 7 for breakfast. We were all groggy from jet lag, so at breakfast, no one even peeped a word except for mom, who was a morning person.

When breakfast was over we all decided to take a bath, luckily our grandparents had three bathrooms. I was the first one to take a bath and I felt so refreshed I could skip through the whole house without getting a headache. I guess mom noticed the song in my step that's why she offered me to go with grandma to the market to buy today's lunch. (She said it was "good exercise" for me.) 

The market looked like a hodgepodge of vegetables and meat. All of the stalls looked unsanitary and wet. Very, very wet. There wasn't even an organized spot for them. I was all deli, vegetables, deli, deli, deli, vegetables, vegetables, deli, and so on! 

But what really appealed to me was the kids leaving for school in their uniforms. I asked grandma about it and she said that in the Philippines school started in June and ended in March or April, depending on when the Holy week began, which was kind of stupid, June could easily be summer for them. You couldn't feel it during 8 in the morning but when the clock hits ten it was stinking hot. In America 28° Celsius was extremely hot but in the Philippines, that temperature would already be considered cool since hot would be 32° Celsius.

Lunch was nice if you wouldn't include multiple people coming in and out the house and would tell you how big you are now, but other than that everything was just peachy. Everyone else spent the rest of the day looking at their phone. Sometimes we would eat a couple of snacks from our grandparent's shop while watching TV. Their shop was filled with all sorts of things like snacks, toys, and things used in everyday life. It was like a convenience store inside a house.

Anyways, I couldn't stand to watch the shows on the TV. They were all soaps in Filipino that you had to watch from the start to understand. So I just took a couple of snacks and retreated into the room and figured to just write. Right now three generations of the Sanchez family are in the kitchen fixing up dinner. Which, if anything, is the best part of being in the Philippines despite its cruel heat and wet, contaminated streets.