home
Lush, soft forests of stately palms, wet lands, muddy mountain trails, and extensive bamboos perfumed the air while pleasing the eye.
House
A red-tiled top with a white-painted concrete structure, seven enclosed rooms (including two bathrooms), six doors that opened toward SSW and one door NW. Divided between two floors. First floor an open space with an adjacent bathroom and back room. Second floor a narrow hallway connected to three rooms, a bathroom adjoining one of which.
Living room comes first before all others, situated at the front right after the front door (included in the door count). North-west staircase comes next, preceding the kitchen-dining room adjoining the bathroom and back room.
Upstairs, from the top of the staircase, two rooms to the left and one to the right. SSW wall of closest room, which is to the left and also has the single NW door, extends from surrounding staircase walls. Farther to the left is the room with an adjoining balcony (excluded from the room count). To the right is the room with the adjoining bathroom with a window that leads into a space surrounded by four sides: the bathroom wall, the window, the neighbor bathroom, and the neighbor window. The space nevertheless opens into the sky above.
These are all the rooms.
The living room and kitchen-table on the first-floor mainly serve their functions as places of dialogue, meeting, engagement, discussion, confrontation, shared watching, eating, and such, even while housing four family members each in their own internet-connected nook.
But the three rooms upstairs are personal. Nevertheless, there are nuances. First, the slight exception being the windowed bathroomed room to the right given that it it large and is used for parents, youngest, and older half-brother to sleep in. Second, the NW-doored room closest to the staircase is only regularly used as a place of rest and temporary stay by the second-to-youngest. Third, the "farther to the left" room is the most personal, its occupant being the most recluse. This is in contrast with the youngest and the second-to-youngest, who stay downstairs for most of their day, one on their own desk, the other on their table, the father in the living room in a corner opposite to the desk's. The older half-brother stays in his room but leaves often for outdoor activities.
Neighborhood
First, the house is on a block with a corner that looks toward the gate, but which is not adjoined and is instead separated by the internal gate intersection. It takes the car only two turns around the block to exit the whole subdivision.
The subdivision has six blocks on the NE side and five blocks on the SSW side. Blocks are separated by a basketball court, tennis court, park, long parking lot, or one of three roads.
Travel
The road leading out of the subdivision soon hits the single main road that links almost immediately to both ground-level and elevated highways in both directions, with only five to ten minutes of jeepney distance.
This area is, in a sense, a portal, a warp gate. With this comes a history of terminals.
Nevertheless, it is very residential as well as practically beside commercial spots. Forty-five minutes of elevated highway travel time to get to the commercial business districts of the country is barely a wait. The primary roads are lined not only with numberless malls, service plazas, and shopping complexes, but also, depending on location, with casual and everyday businesses like a roadside barbershop where a haircut might go for 40 pesos (maybe not in 2025 with the inflation), perhaps around the corner from a Mcdonald's.
Historically, complex travel often relied not on A-to-B buses, but on much wading through crowded foot paths along side roads, informal tricycle terminals, locally known but unobvious jeepney spots, and much local-asking. This regularly involved going inside dim orange-lit indoor places that doubled as a communal indoor market—which contained such establishments as large, wide, communally shared, roofed butcher spaces, adjoining very tight sari-sari stores, and stores with open rice bags labeled and arranged in rows—and as a foot path connecting two seemingly divorced places in a complex, organic, and, to some, deeply human urban way that doesn't look like a office-district-highway A-to-B bus stop travel kind of thing.
Do expect to see many slums clustering informally in or along some in-between spot: on the roadsides (even beside retail warehouses), at the end of side roads (perhaps after a gate that belongs to someone else but is used by the public to get inside, or a publicly used but legally private gate that connects two communities), and beside gated communities so as to see a multi-floor unpainted gray-concrete housing structure towering outside and behind a sleekly white-lined evenly green tennis court wall.
July 14, 2025
Birds
The eurasian tree sparrow sits everywhere: on chain-link fences, on foliage-blanketed poles and electricity wires, the trees standing next to the poles, a parked bicycle, a green cart with three kinds of peanuts in a glass display, parked motorcycles, buses, white taxi cars, and a Mitsubishi Fuso Canter truck, the 7-Eleven sign, an Andok's sign, a banner that reads "Malunggay Bakery", political posters, the thickly entangled electricity lines, a Petron gas price pylon sign, an orthodental clinic, black corrugated construction panels, red fence gates, a Domino's Pizza tarpaulin banner, a 24-hour junkshop roof, security banks, LBC, an Muillier sign, a Chooks to Go, a giant blue fence gate, Plaza Balagtas, and plenty more.
The domestic chicken is a probinsya creature that you might hear here and there in urban spaces depending on where you are and how close you are to the most grounded people.
Honorable mentions: Oriental Magpie-Robin, Yellow-vented Bulbul.
July 15, 2025
To be continued...
