IT'S 40 DEGREES
IT'S SUMMERTIME AGAIN IN THE PHILIPPINES.
AND IT'S GETTING HOTTER!!
It is time to pack your backpacks and choose from thousands of islands you want to visit. Well, that's the only thing the Philippines could offer - 7,107 Islands.
Kidding aside, geographically the Philippines has a lot to offer when it comes to white sands and beaches. Summer is the season to celebrate the much anticipated vacation of children. I can still remember the time when I was 7 years way back in the early 80's, being the nearest get-aways from Manila our family went to Cavite and Batangas every summer to swim. In those days, before reaching the resort, we have to buy along the road some seafood like clams, mussels, fish and oysters and some vegetables that we are planning to cook at the resort. Yes millennials, resorts originated way back in the 80's. Now the in thing is going away as far as Boracay, Puerto Galera, Palawan, Coron, Siargao etc. In Cavite and Batangas resorts, there are cottages for rent, as well as salbabida (that black interior part of the car wheel that is now rare because car wheels now are tubeless) used as a floating device. We can also bring our own snorkels and big umbrellas. And by the way, that banana boat was so in! The sad part is, those resorts are no longer as beautiful and worth dipping today.
Hot temperatures then are just a few degrees higher than room temperature compared to what we are experiencing today, in those days we can still walk along the shore barefooted. Today, try walking on the white sand on mid-summer day without any tsinelas and soon, you'll have a sunburn in your talampakan. Since when have you seen a sunburn lodged on your sole?
At the beach, I saw a lot of amazing and clueless people. Amazing because they are always ready to help to save people who are in the incidents of drowning and clueless because people who do not know how to swim are those people who are on the deeper part of the sea. Amazed because Filipinos smile a lot and clueless because people wear skimpy swimming attire that does not fit their bodies really well, if their bodies could just scream . . . . . Stop Stretching I Have Expanded Enough!!
One unnoticed thing that comes along with this season is about children.
Children have this idea of swimming as a means of competition, that summer is not complete without traveling away from Manila and go some place else where white sands, coconut trees, nipa huts are all in, a place where they can watch small crabs crawl and pick up and collect some sea shells. It is a sense of fulfillment to them and I when I was a kid. To them, it is some sort of a "live a life experience" that they can share with their classmates when the next school day comes. Simple things in life that makes children smile. Happiness that comes from simple dreams and desires, which I believe we all have felt this when we were young. We have just put it in the shelves and called it memories.
There is one thing I have thought about,
In a child's life - if what is real to them is what they get, I assume then that innocence is coherence.
COPYRIGHT 2018
drjohniecuison.blogspot.com
