After months of being downcast and bored to the highest degree, having an eventful day seems to be like a dream. This long weekend is such a nice change to all these dullness that crept into my life this school year.
The long weekend started as boring - classes cancelled for Friday and I'm left watching MTV the whole day while waiting for the storm and the possibility of another flash flood. With the lack of stuff to do, I slept quite early - about ten in the evening. I woke up after five hours, because they suddenly cut off the power killing the cold air conditioning. Santi was way weaker than Milenyo - during the latter, you would really panic because this empty water tank actually flew and landed on our roof with a loud thud. And then, for the second time in my life, I found myself at the eye of the storm. The rains and the winds suddenly stopped, like that in Milenyo, for some thirty minutes. But what's different is it arrived in our spot in San Pedro by six - just in time for sunrise. It's really kinda cool - the colors breaking into dawn over the swirling clouds that forms the eyewall. Woo! New life experience!
The lack of power for most of the Saturday would have been boring on any people's part, but I spent most of the morning - that is, the morning after nine when the winds stopped howling - strolling around our village, examining the damage. Just on the other block, there was some floodwaters. And then, to make up for my lack of sleep (I sleep for about twelve hours on weekends but sometimes I go five days without sleep on weekdays - but that was last year), I slept most of the afternoon.
Sunday still left me with nothing to do - we we're supposed to watch Jeniffer's Body that day, but Santi changed the plans. By four, after hours of watching TV and listening to radio, we left for the cemetery. My mom used to live in Concepcion Uno in Marikina, so the graveyard we we're visiting was Paraiso, in Ampid in nearby San Mateo, Rizal. There was no traffic for most of the journey - where are the people who's supposed to swarm in the cemeteries? Then the car came to a halt for nearly one hour because of the heavy knot of vehicles going to Paraiso. We had to walk a few kilometers to reach the cemetery.
So, a month after Ondoy, I was able to examine the place where lots of the deaths occurred. I guess the residents really coped up with the disaster - most everything is back to normal. But as you go more north, more vestiges of the flood remain. In Paraiso, there's about two inches of wet mud left at the entrance. The soil was still wet. The houses outside have mud on their roofs. That's kinda weird since Ondoy left six inches of mud inside our house, but most of that gunk was cleared the day after the storm.
Anyways, that night at the cemetery was really one o the best parts of my life this school year - playing cards to sharing ghost stories with my cousins. We went home on midnight, which was really scary. Going through Marikina - indeed passing by the entrance of Provident Village - by midnight really does make you feel as if your driving through a ghost town. Very few lights we're lit, very few people are outside.
Today, we we're finally able to watch Jennifer's Body - in TriNoma, on the way to the dorm, with 2 of my cousins. In the middle of the movie, just after one of the scarier scenes, this phone rang and the ringtone was Pussy Cat Dolls. :))
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