Our secret city is gone
We’ve always stayed in Metro Manila during the lenten holidays. While everyone makes a mad dash to the provinces, enduring traffic, congestion and the infernal heat only to run into the exact same people they encounter daily in the city they have just escaped, we enjoy Manila. Emptied of its frantic inhabitants, this place is actually charming: temporarily quiet, comparatively less polluted and chaotic.
We can tool up and down the highway at top speed and visit the burbs which we never see during the working week. Hence our decades-old plan to shut the entrances to Metro Manila and declare it an independent republic one Black Saturday, preventing the vacation crowd from returning to block our view. Aalis-alis kayo, huwag na kayong bumalik.
In recent years many people have caught on that the best place to spend the long weekend is Manila. (Or maybe there are just more people.) We no longer have the city to ourselves. More restaurants stay open, but they’re all full. You have to make reservations at Old Swiss Inn and good luck getting into Cafe Adriatico. Traffic around the restaurants is as heavy as weekday traffic.
Our secret city is gone. Next year we will contrive to get as far away as possible. (Unless by saying this everyone decides to get out next year, in which case we will stay.)
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
April 7th, 2015 at 01:15
Le Grand Meaulnes. Probably my second favorite book.
April 11th, 2015 at 16:39
Lingering effect of growing up in Baguio: “time to go on vacation” is never the first thought in my mind when thinking about Holy Week, because it was always “time to stay indoors and wait for all the tourists to leave again.”
April 11th, 2015 at 16:44
(at the time, I heard about the mythical ’empty city during Holy Week,’ your secret city, and thought it was funny that I lived in Opposite Land)