Our Home Away From Home

 

Home away from home

I struggle at times to describe our home in the Philippines because it is unlike anything I have ever seen in the States. Baguio is built in extremely steep and rugged mountain terrain and all the houses cling to the side of the mountains themselves. Above is our house which looks ordinary enough but in reality, you are just seeing the top two floors of a five story structure.

This house, along with those around it actually start 30 feet below the surface of the street out in front of it. In the case of this house, it starts on the valley floor with some substructure to support it and then maybe ten feet up in the air, the "first" floor begins. It is essentially just a narrow room that is rented out mostly students who attend the local university. The second floor, built on top of that is a bit bigger since the mountain side is sloping away a bit and is rented to a family who haven't yet saved up enough money to buy their own house. The third floor, the ceiling of which is just below the surface of the road, is the first full sized floor and has been rented out in the past to other people. However, not long ago we paid to have it renovated a bit to box in two separate bedrooms from the living areas of the rest and we called that our home while we were there.

The white picket fence in the first photograph is the same white picket fence that you can see in the photograph above. Over two decades ago when I first journeyed to the Philippines, I stayed in the first floor two stories down from this one and accessible by a steep set of steps hacked into the rock in the side of the mountain. Those steps have now been fixed up a bit and you can see the railing of them in the far  background above. They are still steep but are not capped with concrete and have a railing. This time, we used the metal stairs you see above which sneak between the road and the front wall of the house to access our third floor suite.

Above gives you a glimpse of our suite where you see the main living area of our floor. Due to the ever present high humidity and lack of conditioning of any sort (heat or cooling), the furniture is mostly made from durable wicker and topped with very thin and not very comfortable cushions. It always takes my body, namely by butt and back, some time to get used to the new seating arrangements.

The wooden walls to the left in the photo above comprise our two bedrooms that we had built before we arrived. Before, they were just open spaces to everything else and mostly used for storage. We had a small table though we never really used it since we ate all our meals upstairs with the rest of my wife's family.

It also came with a small kitchenette that the previous renter used to cook their meals. Behind it you can see the balcony which overlooks behind the house and if you can visualize, is still completely below road level which is behind me some 20 feet behind me when I took this picture.

The above picture is a panoramic view off the previously mentioned balcony. The opposing ridge of the next mountain above the valley floor is only maybe 60 to 80 feet away as the crow flies. Towards the left center you can see the backside of houses built clinging to that mountain, most of them also being four to five stories tall.

Although hard to show in a photo, here is a view down to the valley floor off our balcony. The metal roofed structure is a storage shed my brother-in-law through together to store things while our 3rd floor suite was being renovated. The house to the left had also been renovated and there was a pile of construction debris on the valley floor behind that house too which is also a five story structure. 

This is a shot looking down the street (4th level) of our house. To the left of the narrow street you can see a rock wall about 20 feet high that essentially holds the mountainside away from the street and on top of it, the bottom floors of more homes clinging to the upper parts of the mountain side are built. I think the house across the 15 feet wide street is three or four stories tall which means standing in the middle of the street, it's roof is close to 50 feet above! 

Being that Baguio is up in the mountains, the temperatures are quite mild compared to the heat of the lowlands. Above you can see the 10-day forecast screen captured from my phone showing how mild the temperatures are this time of year. Being that we arrived after the start of the rainy season, rain was in the forecast everyday and indeed, it did rain nearly everyday of our stay. Generally the mornings and even early afternoons were full of sunshine but by mid afternoon, things would cloud up and we would get a brief rainstorm. An hour later, it would be sunny again until during the night when another brief shower often came. I find the rainy season quite pleasant temperature wise though the downside is the humidity is around 80 to 90% all day long. That takes some getting used to since my clothes and bedding always felt slightly damp to my skin.