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Manila Bulletin devider Opinion devider Long weekends

Long weekends

Published Aug 27, 2024 04:55 am

MEDIUM RARE

Jullie Y. Daza

If it’s any consolation, there’s no long weekend coming up in September. As of now, that is.


Thank God for favors like spring-like weather, no scorching sun, and smooth superhighways to make travel to the south – Silang and Tagaytay, for example – vacation-worthy last week. Even with everybody else longing to be back home in the big city ahead of everyone else after the long weekend, time spent crawling through traffic on SLEX was not as bad as it might have been.


What we can wish for in the meantime is more lights, brighter illumination all the way. The road to a happy vacation ought to be paved with brilliant lighting, and that’s what the Department of Tourism could push Public Works to do for the sake of tourists and locals before the next long weekend. For now, it’s restaurants and gasoline stations providing the lights to push away the gloom.


Once in Silang – the town before Tagaytay -- and you woke up to a new day, the sky was a canvas for clouds, more clouds, awash in an undetermined blue, flecked with a pearl-like gray. Indeed, the temperature was a good two to three degrees lower than in Metro Manila. Which is saying a lot. There was no real need for airconditioning but habit.


What to do in Silang? Penny went looking for herbs but didn’t find any “new” species to add to her collection. Pat-P wanted to visit the market instead of the supermarket. The kids were happy swimming and coming out of the water with no sunburn. Mahjong was a good choice to let time roll by, if only the losers would pay up. For much of the time, creating a fun and fanciful menu was half the fun of cooking, until we decided we might as well do the big meals in Sonny Lua’s now legendary restaurant, Asiong for Caviteño food.


Sonny, an interior designer at heart, has since last year enlarged his restaurant on a new site (not far from the old one). Worried that news of the smog from Taal volcano could keep diners away, he smiled to welcome a family with a reservation for 12.


In the meantime, isn’t it time to discover/develop more getaways after Baguio and Tagaytay?
 

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Jullie Y. Daza Medium Rare
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