There’s nothing deep or emotionally meaningful about this comeback post–my first blog post in the last 4-5 months. It’s just a thought that has passed my mind on more than one occassion, most often when I’m driving.

So in Dumaguete, it’s pretty easy to tell where the directions are: North, South, East and West. Mountains are to the West, and the sea is to the East. It makes it easy to determine where the sun rises, where the sun will hit you when you’re driving in the early morning or late afternoon, and in which direction you’re driving. The roads are pretty straightforward too for the most part, most are exactly parallel and straight and following the lines so as long as you know where the sea and mountains are at, you know which directions the roads go to. Manila on the otherhand…not as much. I was thinking about our house and wondering where I have to face if I want to see the sunrise or sunset, and realised that despite the years I had spent there, I couldn’t immediately tell which direction is which. One of the things that probably made determining that difficult is the fact that we have two huge trees on our property which pretty much block out much of the sun, so you can’t really tell which direction is which; that and that there are just too many houses and buildings in Manila.

Just looking at Google Maps, and you can clearly see that the roads in Metro Manila are all over the place. Diagonal, curved, some are straight from left to right and up to down. You can more or less tell which area is North or South if you’re on a main thoroughfare like EDSA, or if you have an idea about the general direction of a city, such as Makati being north of Paranaque or something like that. But if you were traversing the roads and driving, and had the sudden thought of going to the east or west, then best of luck. Am I the only one who gets confused?

I ended up recalling my time in China, where road signs in big cities are marked with East and West, North and South, so you know which direction you’re going in. Beijing for example, in all it’s capital-ness and big buildings and roads, is pretty straightfoward when it comes to which direction is which. I am not sure if it’s because parts of the city were redeveloped and they made it easier to tell which area is which, but when riding on the subway from where I lived, to for example the Sanlitun area which is popular for shops and clubs, I knew that I was heading in the direction of the east. The “Ring Roads” of Beijing make it easily distinguishable if you’re in the inner or outer areas (how far you were from Tiananmen Square), which district you were in, and which roads were headed into or outside of the city, or more or less whereabouts tourist places where located (such as Summer Palace being the North West, or Qianmen being just south of Tiananmen, or how the Temple of Heaven was even more south of Tiananmen). But then if you look at a map of Xiamen, the roads aren’t completely straight cut either, mostly because a part of the city has a lot of mountains and they probably worked the roads around these areas.

All that being said, I just find it funny how much more straightforward some places can be in terms of road placements and directions. I’m probably a tad influenced by all the hours of playing on Cities:Skylines, and figuring out how to make the most practical and efficient roads, expressways, and neighborhoods in my small make-believe cities.