City Living

Jeffrey and I look out at Quezon City from an apartment window on the 6^th floor. There is an outdoor swimming pool on our floor. Quezon City is a very crowded and has many projects in various stages of construction with modern lines right next to falling down shacks and pinned together dwellings.

There are mansion subdivisions with walls around them and shanty subdivisions all with a beautiful greenness everywhere. The skies are unbelievably beautiful with many colors of clouds and blues. 

Right now we are located in a very large traffic circle with malls and apartments in the middle and malls, shops and apartment buildings on the outside. It is a little hard to describe - apartment high risers up to 35 or more floors flank a three-story mall. Little shops and restaurants are tucked away in doorways that angle off of the main lobby of the mall. Sometimes you go up stairs or an escalator at the entrance to get to a store. Sometimes you go through a store to get to a restaurant.

People are walking and crossing the streets in between the cars, jeepneys and motorcycles weaving in and out of each other. I don’t know if the traffic ever stops because whenever I look out there are lots and lots of vechicles on the roads. (Traffic warrants its own post). People walk, ride the bus, jeepnies, motorbikes (1 to 3 people on them) and I heard there was a train though I haven’t seen one yet. There are people bustling around all the time because many 24-hour call centers are in some of the high risers too. The apartment basements have 5 levels of parking. There is the ground floor and lobby and then floors 1 through 5 are more parking. The cement walls in the garage are all painted different colors at each level with birds, or butterflies, or flowers etc.

Our apartment is actually rented by an American dentist who hasn’t made it back  here after leaving to take care of his family. His daughter and son-in-law got killed in a tragic plane accident and have left children who are sudden orphans. It sounds like he won’t make it back until January. He has been a major component of having this MTC dental clinic and pushed hard to have it built. After a week of working in the newly completed clinic in July he flew home.

Everything is built on a small scale and it is really nice that it is just Jeffrey and I.  I am not sure how they raise children in such small apartments. I know I hear children in the outdoor swimming pool on our floor, and I’ve watched tiny busses come in the front turn around circle and pick up individual children for school.