Unexpectedly

The concept of land and sea breezes is one of the first things I remember learning in gradeschool, back when I was still a science geek. I won't bother trying to explain it here, but it accounts for the fact that if you live near the coastline, the wind moves towards the land in the daytime and towards the sea at night. Though I live relatively near the sea in Davao, I never personally experienced this phenomenon. So you might say my learning was vicarious, which is the case with most of what I read in books. But recently, I've been noticing that walking along Padre Faura, which happens to be a street perpendicular to the Manila bay, I sometimes find myself facing the wind when walking to school in the mornings and walking home in the late afternoons. It happened again today, and it's just now that I noticed that this concept I learned early in life (and thought of at most to be something nice to know) would actually be working to my advantage at present.

Because sometimes, when I walk the street and find myself facing the wind, I forget the stench and ugliness that surround me and find that there are still some things in this congested metropolis that are beautiful.