Earth Hour

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Japan Home Center

With not so much to do at home, I decided to go to the Greenhills shopping center in San Juan, Metro Manila. Greenhills is a blog-inducing thing but I will write about it some other time.

This topic is all about Japan Home Center, a store found not only in Greenhills but in other shopping malls as well. It sells various Japanese products for home and personal use.

What's amazing about this store is everything sells for 88 pesos ($1.83 at the current peso-dollar exchange rate of 48:1)!

There are really nice things one can buy from this store. There are plastic containers to organize various objects at home. There are magazine holders as well as file containers.

One can even get soy sauce, sweet vinegar and white vinegar needed to make sushi. And of course, they carry my favorite snack, wasabi peas.

The store reminds me of the 99 cents store in the U.S. where one can buy practically everything to live. What's missing from Japan Home Center are the food stuff that are priced below one dollar.

Of course, buyers should understand that at that price, they shouldn't expect these things to last a lifetime.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Pray It Rains

Earlier this month, the Philippines had a major problem. A prolonged dryspell caused severe drought in certain parts of Luzon. It was so severe that government itself told the people to conserve water or face dry faucets in the months to come. Rice farmers lost one planting season because there was not enough water to keep their plants alive.

The Catholic Church offered one solution (the Church is quite influential in our country). They asked the faithful to pray. So one Sunday, all churches in the country led the millions of Catholic Filipinos to pray for rain. And pray we did.

Our prayers must have shaken the pearly gates of Heaven because after a few days, rain started to fall. Every afternoon, the skies darkened, thunderclaps were heard and heavy rains ensued.

And it didn't end there. After another few days not one, but two typhoons developed in our area and dumped tons upon tons of rain water.

Provinces in the northern part of the country were inundated, the national capital region had to cancel school and work because of rising flood waters. There was literally water everywhere, from east to west of our archipelago.

In spite all the troubles, most Filipinos were still thankful. The rains brought relief to months of heat and humid weather. Dams were refilled to safe levels, irrigation wells replenished and the government announced that we won't be having a water crisis after all.

Yet, they say that we still need more rain.