Rains and Traffic

Last Wednesday my children experienced their very first downpour here at Quezon City. Not that rains are new to them, but that was their first time to see the effects of a heavy downpour on traffic in Major Metro Manila streets. For more than an hour, the rains poured at Loyola Heights, drenching Aurora Boulevard, Katipunan Road, Esteban Abada, Xavierville Avenue and all the streets in between.

All vehicles that happened to be there at around 3:30 p.m. had to endure heavy traffic for the rest of the afternoon. From the vantage point of our room, we saw slow, slow, moving vehicles until way past 7 p.m.

The experience was an eye-opener. My son and his friends stayed in a car for about an hour. Considering that the distance they were supposed to travel was less than 2 kilometers, that time spent in the car without their DS Lites and PSPs was next to eternity.

I was a passenger in a car then (which was better than being the driver of the car) and all througout the time I was sitting there, I amused myself by imagining how all the school bus drivers were coping in the environment of a closed vehicle full of irritated school children. The jeepney, taxi and tricycle drivers surely lost a lot of opportunities what with being stuck in the same place for an hour.

Dinner was take-out food. I did not have the energy to cook anymore and knowing myself, I would have not cooked well that night anyway. That left me some time to watch the evening news with their reports on the Quezon City floods.

Again, the floods in an urban setting was a new experience for my kids and another future opportunity for me to blog about.