personal statement rambling, part two

So, this was supposed to be my opening paragraph and about half of my personal statement. I work terribly slow, and it took about 4 days to write these three paragraphs. I read it over and over and realized that I'm rambling too much; it's too much like a section of a novel rather than a personal statement. Probably gonna scrap about 80% of this and start over.

Anways, Enjoy :)

My grandpa continued to stand just outside the doorway, watching to see if I had locked the gate correctly. The day before, he took me along the route I was to take in order to reach the Supreme Court of the Philippines. As I locked the front gate, I rehashed my route: walk two blocks, pass the teenagers playing basketball while wearing flip flops, board a modified World War II military Jeep functioning as a public bus, disembark at España Boulevard, board another bus, endure pollution smog, pass Rizal park and yell “Stop,” get off the bus, walk past the dental school and voilà, the Supreme Court. Yet, as I walked through the neighborhood, I was still venturing into the unknown. It seems that all of my important journeys in life start with a journey into the unknown.

I held this gleaming vision of the Supreme Court as a white-marbled, pristine institution in the middle of the gritty, raw Manila city life. In that respect, I was correct - every weekday morning, I walked through the security checkpoint and encountered a neo-classical styled, white-marble facade that held a certain amber glow in the tropical morning sun. Every other preconception about the Court was shattered. The hallways of the main building were subject to dim fluorescent lighting and indoor temperatures closely matched the lingering tropical heat outside. Work inside the Court paralleled life in Manila: gritty, sweaty, blunt. Even some simple legal research was conducted by dusting off old volumes of Court decisions in the law library and carefully flipping through yellowed pages. Yet, amidst the tropical heat, Justice Reyes’ office kept churning along.

I was truly humbled by my first week’s experience. My first important internship, in another country to match, began not with a fanfare entrance, but with a stumble into a very different environment. So, for the start of the second week, I decided to embrace the gritty commute, the heat, and the dusty legal books in the law library. And not surprisingly, I did not undergo an instant personal transformation as planned. Throughout my internship, work did not become easier and my morning commute still left me with sweat stains. Ordinary life in Manila simply did not consist of the simple luxuries I was accustomed to back in the U.S. This simple, banal fact of life only become apparent to me when I consciously made the effort to drop my preconceived notions of the city and start from scratch.