Every step I take along the dirt road leaves an imprint

“Indonesian.”
Without looking up from the guide map, I knew the murmurs were about me. Here in India, the farthest away I’ve been from the Philippines, I already lost count on the number of times I was mistaken as a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, whether be it asked directly to my face or whispered a little too loudly beside me.
When I was in a shop in Agra, the shopkeeper suddenly asked me where do I work in America. To clear the confusion, I told him I’m from the Philippines. As it turned out, he thought I was American because of my accent.
But I’ve already passed the point of incredulity that I apparently look like, and now sound like, everyone else except my own people. I’ve been fortunate to visit a number of countries but in every country I’ve been, the song remains the same. I’m familiar enough to be assumed belonging to a similar ethnic group but never distinct enough to stand out as a Filipino. Every turn of my head screams I’m Korean, every flick of my finger spells I’m Japanese, and I’m not Filipino because I don’t give enough clues to be taken as such at face value. But because of that, I fully realized how each traveler has to act in a manner that will engage people to learn about a world they might not be familiar with. Traveling afforded me the chance to taste the culture in my tongue, to soak in the sights and sounds not present in my country. But as much as I take pieces of the world back home with me, I also carry my part of the world each time I step into a foreign soil.
Because the staggering truth is this: there are about 193 countries in the world and yet, the world shrinks to just YOU. That is the burden place on the traveler – to be the representative of a world he knows like the palm of his hand. But that’s what made traveling great as well. That despite the finiteness of human life, each time someone dares to venture to see new lands and meet new people, the traveler tells a lifetime of stories.