A walk home from Ateneo

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Here are some photos we took while walking back from Ateneo the other day. Hope you enjoy.

            As I mentioned earlier, we have to negotiate 90 steps between Barangka (our neighborhood) and Ateneo’s campus. We’re already about a third of the way down the stairs in this photo.

            There are guards who check Ateneo IDs at every entrance. Here’s a picture of the access point we use (looking out from Ateneo towards Barangka).

        

    There’s a fence around Ateneo’s property so there is a big grassy/forested area that abuts the buildings of Barangka. Lots of the neighborhood roosters sneak off into these areas to hang out during the day. There are roosters all over the place: in the alleys, in big cages on people’s porches, off in the woods at Ateneo, etc. We hear them every morning but our AC unit mostly drowns out their noise.

            After exiting Ateneo we walk through a number of little alleys to get to our apartment. No cars or motorbikes on this little road here so it’s popular with the cats.

         

There are lots and lots of stray cats around. They like to hang out in some of the smaller alleys without motorized traffic although they’re present in other places as well.

            About halfway between Ateneo and our apartment is the Barangka community basketball court. We walk past this every day and there are always people playing. Basketball seems wildly popular here. A former Fulbright scholar actually wrote a fun book about basketball in the Philippines called Pacific Rims.

            This view is from the roof of our four-story apartment building overlooking General Julian Cruz street. There’s more action here than on the various alleyways above but it’s still a very manageable street. There are always lots of children playing outside and we’re slowly learning some of their names.

      Since our building is one of the taller ones in the area we have a great view of neighboring roofs. There are some random things thrown up on some of them but there are always one or two tsinelas (flip-flops) that end up there. If you look closely, you can also see a little toy truck stranded on this roof.

            To get to our building from Gen. Julian Cruz you walk down a little alley. Next to our entrance is a little area where people play a game that’s a cross between pool and shuffleboard. We’re not sure what it’s called yet.

Tonight we’re heading off to another concert at University of Philippines, this time one that features older styles of music from when the Spanish were here. Audience members are supposed to dress in nineteenth-century Spanish/Filipino garb so we it should be an interesting evening.