One hot sunday afternoon...

By: Mark Paralejas

My girlfriend is a native of Marikina City, I’ve been there most of the time, most of my weekend time; with her and with her family… but there’s one itch that opt to be scratched; that is, getting a Marikina walking tour with her as my city guide.

Marikina is a fine city, but not that usual type of city which thieves lurk around the corner waiting for a would-be victim, not that noisy, not that polluted, and with tons of bike lanes. In other words, Marikina is half province and half city. Talk about demigods of cities.

Sunday, February 21, 2010. We decided to go to Marikina to take photos with the aid of my beat up car Wolf yes, I name my transports, my mountain bike name is Blade, she using a dslr, and me sticking with my weapon of choice a film slr. We went to Pan de Amerikana; it’s a restaurant-slash-bakery, clad with a real spinning wind mill as the restaurants facade. The place is mag-ni-ficent, kind of like of the atmosphere you have at your homes, and kind of like my future garden would be, aside of that’s bigger than I imagined.

The weather is painstakingly humid, and I sweat a lot more than I sweat during biking time. You see, I’m a big bucket of sweat; even train rides at Light Rail Transit 2 (the one that’s Santolan Pasig to Recto line is, the big wide train that’s very slow and gets too hot when people starts to stack up) makes me wet…with sweat. But I still love to walk; maybe it’s in my genes to walk as a hobby, yes, as a hobby. I walk to clear my head, but I never really thought of walking as an exercise routine. I walk to make tipid of the pamasahe on jeepneys. I walk, because I enjoy it.

If you like eating wheat bread, then Pan de Amerikana wheat pandesal is for you, only Php5.50 per piece and it’s as big as your palm (don’t even think about it if you’re as big as Shaq). Google it, if something came up the search then good for you…

Next stop, the St. Scholastica’s College where my girl graduated high school. And ta-da! The school is closed and we can’t do anything about it, so no photos for us to take. So we decided to take another spot to go “picture-picture”, and behold! The World of Butterflies came to our minds with supreme “oh yeah sure let’s check it out” gesture. It’s so gay to look at butterflies and say “look at that! look at that! Wow! It’s a colorful butterfly!” and that day, I was gay.

We went out to see Wolf sitting at the parking lot alone with a scorpion robot with an MMDA big bike body with some engine parts still intact. We grab some snack, and I noticed that I don’t have any film left for my Canon slr; I envy dslr cameras because you just have to shoot away with some two thousand or more pictures in a single battery charge. I changed cameras, the camera loaded with a fresh roll of film, my friends underwater camera the Nikonos IV-A with the ability to shoot awesome photos under the depths of approximately 160ft. if you happen to cross paths with a Nikonos, you’ll know instantly that its an underwater camera, but if you’re a regular bloke, you see it as a sweet looking mechanical-old-vintage-alien-looking-camera. Believe me I don’t know what I’m shooting since I use single lens reflex cameras, you guessed it right, Nikonos IV-A isn’t an slr. I prefer film more than digital.

After drinking toxins, I mean...er…softdrinks. We went to the University of the Philippines Diliman sunken garden (not really a garden though, maybe a garden of gremlins at midnight) to chill, again, took some photos….and took some more, some more, and some more with a family of seven, yes seven kids with their dad trying to fly a kite with a non-existent blow of wind.

We called it a day after watching athletes practicing at sunken garden sucked at soccer.