Talk about Mother Nature changing her mind so abruptly—from sweltering heat to flooded streets literally overnight!  Wasn’t it just a few days ago when most of us were complaining with the record highs for the year, and yet yesterday many got stranded with flash floods that swept some of the roads in the Metro?  Does this mean that summer (or the dry season to be exact) is officially over?

Being a tropical country, the Philippines generally has two seasons: the wet and dry seasons.  The latter is either the cool dry season from February to December, or the hot dry season from March to May which we normally refer to as summer.  We’re hardly into the beginning of the second week of May, yet the wet season is already here!  And we even have a typhoon—Bebeng (Aere)!

We can’t argue the huge savings we have now from electricity consumption with the cool weather, but the thing is it’s not just cool, it’s wet!  And it doesn’t just rain, it pours!  With this “bed” weather I could think of tons of excuses not to get up early from my bed, and lots more for running!  Because of this weather I wasn’t able to do my weekend run, so now I feel so lazy!  I just stayed at home this past weekend, doing just a marathon of watching movies and TV series.

The bigger picture for me is that summer may already be over!  For someone like me who wasn’t able to visit any beach during the season, it’s a huge let down.  Hopefully after this typhoon passes we still have some nice sunny days in between before the full onset of the rainy season (which is supposed to be not until June).  I can’t think of a better way of spending summer, no matter how short, but to frolic and run on the beach!  Of course having some new beach-side profile pictures for Facebook would also be nice!

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Trivia:

• Did you know Wikipedia counts Philippine seasons as three?  These are hot dry season (tag-init), rainy season (tag-ulan), and cool dry season (tag-lamig).
• The northernmost province of the Philippines, Batanes, has four seasons (yes, including winter, albeit no snow), distinct from the rest of the country.
• The Philippines may not have snow but sub-zero (freezing) temperatures occur, particularly on mountain peaks during December to February.  I personally experienced this during our climb to Mt. Pulag.