This gave me a headache. I just realized Ayala Museum faces Dela Rosa St. at an angle so it took me some time before I was able to determine how slanted this facade was. I need to adjust some more lines that don’t align. 😑 And I painstakingly counted all the glass panes. *wrinkles growing on my forehead* I don’t want Leandro Locsin Jr. to come after me with an axe for sabotaging his building.
I have my vanishing points mixed up. I need more exercises on vanishing points. 🤔
So it is done. I no longer have an official passport in the next 3 weeks.
I had been lining up the whole day today. First, for the girls’ second dose of Pfizer. Thankfully, it only took us an hour compared to 2.5 hours the first time. I drove them home and I went to Robinsons Novaliches where the satellite DFA office was for NCR North.
After entering the mall, I decided to have brunch first at McDonald’s and finish some digest I need to publish today. It was hard to concentrate 😫 but I had to finish what I can. Then I lined up again at DFA. The actual process was just less than 30 mins because everything was done online and the clerks just needed to verify and have my fingerprints and photo taken but it was the queue that took forever. This was different from what some friends told me when they just breezed through their renewal process in some locations like Robinsons Magnolia or SM Aura.
On the way back home I was debating whether I should drop by QC Circle to buy flowers. Well, well, well… Commonwealth Avenue in Fairview was lined with plant stores. Hahahaha! That decided for me. I bought four more flowering plants since some of mine at home dried up despite watering them twice a day. It’s just that it’s so freaking hot these days.
It was so hot that when I got home I was so exhausted. The heat sucked the life out of me and I just fell asleep. It was so hot that I was tempted to buy a giant Megabox plastic bin in Handyman that I can fill up with water so I can just soak in there.
As part of my urban sketching practice, I want to visit Escolta, Manila—the old shopping district in Manila before and after WW2 before Makati CBD came into being—to sketch the old Art Deco buildings there.
I should have done it in January when the heat was less deadly.
Escolta was the old CBD that’s why it was the fashionable area of the city then. The old banks’ and trading houses’ headquarters were located there. The old tranvia of Manila plied Escolta then.
By the 1920s and into the ’30s, the Manila Tramway became one of the most extensive tram networks in Asia, rivalling those in far more populated cities like Hong Kong (600,000 by 1930) and Tokyo (4,000,000 by 1930). Its 100-kilometre urban and interurban service carried a recorded 35 million passengers during its peak year in 1925. The tramway was a central part of the rapidly modernizing city, as the former colonial port town was growing up fast. The American influence and capital that had flowed into the Philippines following the US takeover brought with it a host of impressive Beaux-Arts and later Art Deco edifices, as a series of new office towers, government buildings, and train stations began to transform the Philippine capital.
Manila’s Long-Lost ‘Tranvias’ Once the Envy of Asia
Pedestrians in the photos were smartly dressed. The tranvia network was completely destroyed after WW2. Well, Manila was the most devastated city in the world after Warsaw when the war ended. The crafty Americans gave the Philippines independence right after because the country was so war-torn and expensive to rebuild. We were left to our own devices after that.
One of these days I would brave Manila and seek some haunting scene that I could sketch. Maybe I can start with the old Luneta Hotel.
