Waking up for the sunrise is always a pain in the butt. When you’ve lived in Baguio for six years - including coerced 7-AM call times courtesy of second-semester Journalism classes - you’d know what I mean. While sunsets are always awe-inspiring and almost always romantic, sunrises are best experienced alone. This I learned from my recent trip to Malaysia, where, for three straight days, I had managed to drag myself from bed and into the dark in time for the melancholic, but no less majestic, rise of the sun against some of the most spectacular beaches I’ve been to. 
Maybe it’s the novelty of it all that did it, or maybe it’s the fact that the sun rises a little past 6 AM on that side of the globe - a full hour earlier than here - that made the experience less strenuous than if I had to do it back here. And my three-day solo sojourns to the beach turned out to be the highlight of my trip—one I’m not going to forget any time soon, used as I am to a life back home that’s rarely spent in solitude. In many ways it had been therapeutic - the perfect cap to a totally unplanned trip that I realized I needed.
The Universe indeed has its ways. I look forward to being amazed all over again. 
