The City of Pines is an in-between place where people, specifically university students, travel through and where they do not linger—kind of like an airport.
A place that exists as a means to an end: to be traveled through, and not lingered in. Just like a movie theater hallway where people pace through after a late-night watch. An isolated highway rest stop filled with good-for-nothing chewing gums and frozen-cold hotdog buns. Or that sketchy waiting shed in a dark alleyway filled with obscene graffiti.
Baguio is that kind of town that you go through, not to. It is a place you need to go, to get to where you are really headed. One can see an endless parade of young people wandering around the university belt, but only a few of them live there. Students dwell in that city for a while, and that city exists only to briefly shelter them.
“No one settles in Baguio. Maybe two or…
