Calax

Sometime ago I took photos on the stretches of Nuvali blvd toward Laguna Blvd, and the same blvd leading toward the Mamplasan toll exit through Greenfield's road.  I remember posting a photo of a flowering Narra tree on an island just recently.

Boy am I glad I did.  Because really, the road side is now unrecognizable.  Some pylons are already up along that technopark road, along the San Jose villages.  I gasped upon seeing there is actually now a gas station right outside the entrance of the Tamayo's Dalta Royale estate...which is next to Verdana Mamplasan.

I'm sorry.

We cannot have it both ways...the small town ambience, with small roads and trees, and the growing population and volume of vehicles needing more roads.

In the Narra's place will be a major intersection with a flyover.  I do pity the residents along the rear of the Santarosa Estates 1 and the Santa Rosa Villages.  When you buy property, you never imagine parts right outside it will become a highway.

When we bought the lot we are in now, we asked...and asked...about the raw land that is both our green view and beyond our village.  Who owns it, what might their plans be for it?

Alas...we see more vehicles on a road there.  I have heard of friends feeling lost when Waze directed them there rather than the usual road from bgy. Tibig.
I sense a change coming, if not that being actually the Calax's route.

I have largely felt backward and silly, selfish and so not "progressive" ranting about these "developments".  But the other day I also felt assured that this OA of mine is not really OA...I am not the only one being OA (over-acting) about it.
Another mother who also moved here around the same time less than ten years ago, expressed the same...

The same OA that says dang, we are not in Kansas anymore, let's move.

My other friends joked about how insane it is that we complain about the "traffic" on the Santa Rosa-Tagaytay Rd...when it is nothing compared to MANILA traffic.  But really... it is not OA, the dismay is real.  

So is the sight of plastic, paper and other trash on the parking lots (especially of the gravel parking) in Solenad, Nuvali on Monday mornings.

As for NOISE pollution...let me talk about the Nuvali Light and Sound show some other time. I can freaking hear it when I open my windows at home.  The wind carries the sound. And the search lights are no fun either.  But wait, I already ranted about this last year. I remember seeing the bothered birds illuminated by the lights.

I don't know...the show is really COLD.  First, in the daytime it is nothing but an ugly mess of plastic and wires on the green field.  For the show, it is just too techno for my kind of Christmas.  I mean, I grew up in the ear of COD Department store animated displays... and that was HEARTWARMING.

This light show?  No Christmas warm fuzzies at all. Just so...synthetic. Sorry.

The Calax

I am just selfish.  A terrible thing happened at 7 a.m. last Friday morning.

About a dozen dump trucks stopped traffic on Nuvali blvd...along the portion behind Santarosa Estates 1&2. This Blvd is heavy with vehicles early weekday mornings... comin and going from Mamplasan...Silang South blvd...and Nuvali.

It was my green road... with trees on the left and green green grass.

I try to ignore the transmission towers.Ere.

Now...I cannot ignore & will have to go through... construction of the Cavite

Laguna Expressway Here

In the words of Darth Vader.... Noooooooooooo!!!!!

April Showers Bring Narra Flowers

I know...Narra overload in this blog.  But in the past posts they came in March

http://lagunagingerlily.blogspot.com/2011/03/mmm-
smell-that-its-narra-tree.html

, a day after a rainshower too.

These bloomed on April 19.

  Oh here is my pineapple in a pot...I do appreciate pineapples more now...never knew they took long to grow...

I woke up to the narra's fragrance, and looked at them in golden sunlight just after sunrise.

Bye-bye Narra tree, after 8 exactly years!

They do bloom at the same time...like these on Inchican Road...and further up, in St. Scholastica's Westgrove campus...

So have you seen/smelled any lately?  How about in the UP Diliman campus? 

Road to Camp N

   So I met the same Canlubang herd (I'd like to think) again this past week... The same herd in my Venare post, and most likely the same herd outside Nuvali, on the road to Casile. 

    This time on the road behind (beside?) Elaro (which I am attracted to for its hills and trees), toward Camp N.

     It has been sunny and bright here, and by 4:30 pm cool and windy. Temp read 25 but it felt more like 20. Tonight the moon appeared, full, bright yet diffused.

Note the Egret

Note the peak up ahead...Palace in the Sky (People's Park) and Tagaytay Highlands

That "Marcos Mansion", Canlubang

Zigzag down the ridge...

 Bouganvilla used to bloom here...

Down at Canlubang...

out to Nuvali

 Incredibly large crowds along the lake...

Rainbow over Qualimed

It was difficult to stop along Nuvali Blvd early rush hour morning, but I could not resist...a double rainbow, full from end to end and wide, over Sta.Rosa-Silang, over the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay Road.  So...beautiful on a sunny August morning.

If you try, maybe you can see at least one, faint because I could not stop right away.  Just look above the tree in the center.

In the middle is Qualimed, the hospital due to open in the 1st quarter of 2017.

The healthcare options are getting wider in this area...

Makiling Sunset

From one of the Alveo villages in Nuvali, Canlubang, Laguna.
June 5, 2016

Laguna Very Gingerly

Okay I'm a hypocrite. Ranting about the new malls in town...yet seeing two movies since their Cinema opened a month ago, and enjoying the fact that they are new and nearby.

At the second movie today,  something happened to me.  I felt what seemed like a tiny bug crawling on my leg.  What happened was, it reminded me of where I was.  Happy to be in a cozy new cinema with only about 15 other people in the audience, five minutes away from home.  Then wham! my chest suddenly went heavy remembering what stood there BEFORE the mall was built.

Just five years ago these were fields of cogon...where we watched shrikes perched on thin branches.  Further into Nuvali, fields where in March kites were flown.  Actually, there were kites being flown yesterday, and I'm not sure if it was an event open to the public, but it was certainly not in the same scale as the kite-flying events of five years ago.

There were many children in the malls' play areas, the parking lots immediately filled by dusk.  So many people. Just mid-week there were press releases by the POPCOM (Population Commission) about...overcrowding in Metro Manila and the move toward Calabarzon.  Here we are.

I still find it a bit ironic...to have to have fitness gyms and equipment in a place where people (used to, some still do) enjoyed walking, running and biking outdoors.  I remember thinking about a correlation between the existence of malls, and obesity---because a lot of the people I first met here were fit and enjoyed the outdoors versus in the more urban areas where, really...fat people were in the indoor malls.

I know...I'm not making that much sense again, with disconnected statements.  I am just ranting again, and calling myself...a hypocrite about this.

Things are just not the same anymore. And you know what? Everybody is coughing, right? Suddenly, kids whose asthma allergies have not occurred since two years ago, are suddenly sick again.  And I have a theory.

CONSTRUCTION DUST.

Well, I will end with this shot, not a particularly great shot...taken at a cafe on the ridge.  Where I stared, very cold due to cold winds even at 11 a.m. The Taal lake was visible but not in this photo. A waiter came and said "Ma'am, nakakamangha diba", referring to the view... I asked if he probably was not from the area...and he said he was from there,  from Cavite.  It was nice that this waiter, with artista looks, admired the view as much as most of the customers...and paused to stare himself.  Then he said..."Ganito yan ma'am...'pag heartbroken ka, sigaw ka lang dyan..."

Well, I guess I AM heartbroken...torn...appreciate the paved paradise, do I?  I seem to have no choice.

PAF rescue chopper

0800H  today, at the Nuvali field. For Solenad's Emergency Drill.

     The Philippine Air Force (PAF) helicopter passed low over our home at around 7 and upon hearing it, my child asked "..airplane?".   Which reminds me how different her childhood is from mine.  At least where identifying aircraft is concerned.  

    You see, I grew up and spent around a quarter of a century, the growing up years of my life, living in military bases...the air force ones in particular.  A huge asthma trigger for me was the smell of airplane fuel,  I knew the dawn was coming when the commercial airlines' engines would warm up, or being tested, at the hangar nearby. And with my father having been a pilot, I did hope to learn to fly too.

   And here, in Sta. Rosa, save for the occasional private helicopters heading South usually over Tagaytay, and the airlines soaring very high above, my child does not hear aircraft.

   Which is probably a good thing, as the noise and air pollution must have done a number on my brain.

  

    Still...this sight is something I do miss. I could not help but take photos.  Ayala Mall Solenad cinema is in the background, on the right.  The white structure on the left is the new S&R.

Nuvali via Silangan Exit

    Past the now famous Eton/Asia Brewery toll exit, shortly after the Cabuyao exit, is "Silangan".  To get to Nuvali from here, you will have to enter the Carmelray Industrial Park or Carmeltown.  That road is a wide avenue bordered by many big old trees.  Beautiful trees.

   In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cogon,  surprise! A branch of San Sebastian College stands, its architecture gothic to mimic the original basilica in Manila.  Wow, San Sebastian here, who knew?

     Then you arrive in Nuvali, and if you have one of the appropriate car stickers, you take either the left or right side of the road. The right turn leads you alongside Avida Settings, and directly across Treveia and Xavier school.  The left one leads to this mass housing development, Avida Parkway I believe, or another Avida.  It is also next to the Venare development, which, if I remember right, is an "Alveo" development.  

    Heck, Nuvali's just too big and has too many villages within it, too many names keep cropping up!

     I can rant and rave about the loss of grassland (sugarland) "till the cows come home" (sorry!had to!), but there's no stopping "development", is there.

       Will they really still have a "home" in a few years...

     My seven year old asked..."are they free-range cows!"  I don't know if she realized how loaded this question actually was...because really, their "range" was just the other side of the road, where many houses stand.

     After the Republic Wake Park, straight on leads to Miriam College, while to the right is the main Nuvali blvd. Montecito is on the left, and straight on to the end is the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay road.  And, sigh, the Ayala Mall.

     Ah...Canlubang.  So different now.

   *If you do not go through Carmeltown (and pass its Morningfields village, The Mills Country Club, you will go through busy streets through which there is Ceres village, a PNP camp, a Puregold, Jollibee...  and end up at the Canlubang rotunda, the one between two gates of Nuvali...on the pot-holed street where Camella Homes Dos Rios, and Wyeth, Universal Robina, are located.  This rotunda is NOT really under Nuvali's jurisdiction, but there is cooperation in securing it.

     I proved this once when I saw two men with what looked like homemade cannons climbing into the grassy hill along the rotunda.  I told the gate guard who said they will send the roving team, and they did.  

      The other street leads to the Canlubang Golf and Country Club, AND a route, albeit rough, up to Tagaytay, where the People's Park/Palace in the Sky and Tagaytay Highlands are.  Along the way is also an old Marcos mansion...it still stands, in ruins.  There is also a "Japanese tunnel", which I think I mentioned some years ago...and which was a destination among students looking for thrills (I believe there is a pool of water they swim in?
I would not feel too safe going through this road in the evenings though. It's quite isolated.