Beating Summer Heat in Manila

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What do you do when you can't bear the hot, hot, hot summer nights in Manila anymore? The whole months of March and April, and now it's the middle of May, we've been patiently enduring hot days and nights. Turning the electric fans on give some relief but we try not to use them often for fear that the electric bill would skyrocket. Just imagine how much people who turn on their air-conditioners the whole day have to pay.

What we lower middle class do is make manual fans of hard cartons or cardboard. Better if made of used illustration boards. Or we buy plastic or accordion manual fans. And then we find satisfaction in drinking iced water. For instance, my wife and I just bought 2 plastic bags of ice for P2 each at a nearby street store. We let that soak in a pitcher of water and later, we enjoy glasses of ice-cold water to fight the summer heat with.



We find satisfaction in that.

Plus, we take a bath 3 to 5 times a day--well, we take a bath once and take half-baths the rest of the time.

Some of our neighbors have air-conditioned homes--which we can't afford--so all we do is imagine how it is to live in fully air-conditioned homes. Imagine sleeping in a posh bed in an elegant air-conditioned room each night, and especially in summer! I and my family only experience that when someone like my sister treats the clan out to a resort-hotel overnight stay like the one in Tagaytay. We went there in March and April, all expenses paid by my sister.

Worse is when in the middle of a hot night flying termites suddenly appear right inside your house--in the bedroom, kitchen, dining, living, and even outside the house. Called "gamu-gamo" in the vernacular, others say they're small moths. But I saw somewhere online how someone called them flying termites. And I think that's a more apt term because these insects later turn into termites. And they come from termite colonies. And these small flying creatures bite.

So, when they appear, we have to get out of the house and roam the streets for a while. Or, we stay in dark places. We close the lights so that these creatures fly out and linger around street lights (they love bright lights), sometimes crazily flying together and circling a light source like a tornado.

Imagine what we have to endure in hot, hot, hot summer nights in Manila. But strangely, amid all these, we still find reasons to laugh at ourselves and the hardships we have to endure. I don't know--it's probably because we have no choice but to live like that, and we figure it's better to just enjoy and laugh, no matter how miserable, than to complain and be stressed out and still not get any answers.

That's life in Manila.