Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

My co-teacher who scheduled the stargazing for later is apprehensive that it seems to be a little cloudy. I told him that it could still clear up. The daily astronomy bulletin I subscribed to recently though, says that the forecast for tonight in Caloocan (their nearest weather station) and its environs is Cloudy.
We’ll still see. At worst there are several other weeknights to reschedule to. It’s okay if it gets postponed though, because the moon will be visible in the early evenings tonight until May 16.

Last Thursday I had lunch at the Manila Sanitarium before going home from the overnight. It seems they have adopted stricter measures with the possibility that any of the people coming in for treatment could be infected with that virus everyone else is so scared about. There were masks available at the guard for purchase to anyone going in. These were just white cloth masks priced at five pesos each. As another measure, young children were no longer allowed on certain floors of the hospital.

When I said that I was just going to the cafeteria, though, which is also on the first floor thirty feet from the entrance, I was waved through without a mask. Of course, I could have wandered around the hospital maskless, but that would have been at my own risk.
I wonder if the alert is also the reason they’ve started using all disposable plates, cups and utensils again, a practice they haven’t done in years.
It still seems a lot of trouble to go through for a healthy meal though, so it’s a good thing there’s another meatless place to go to just around the corner, which is where I ate lunch after yesterday’s overnight.

Instead of rice meals like the cafeteria, their only ready to eat menu are siopaos, burgers, barbeque and spaghetti. They also specialize in frozen products like “bacon”, embotido and sausages. The chicken sausage was tasteless last time I tried it in 1995. One of my students at the time compared it to eating paper.

I had the spaghetti and a regular (no-whole wheat) siopao “for dine-in”. I also had a small cup of soya malt. I was surprised when my bill was seventy pesos. The spaghetti was thirty five pesos; the siopao was seventeen pesos. The soya malt was eighteen pesos; that was so much not worth it, considering I could get a large cup of the same (almost twice the size) in the Sanitarium for only twenty pesos.

It’s just like the packets of powdered soya drink they sell, which in the supermarket costs much less per box. But other than those (and the soy coffee, whose residue has the same texture as wet sawdust) it’s still a convenient place to go just a short walking distance between my two rides going to and from work.

Next time I'll surely buy some frozen products to restock the icebox at home.