Blank is #BetterByBicycle

First of all, I'd like to add that grocery shopping is better when you do it in a public market than big supermarket chains like Savemore or Pure Gold, because 1) you support small and local business owners, they need more of our support than the billionaires who own those supermarket chains. 2) The goods being sold in the public market has  no or less plastic packaging unlike the ones sold in supermarkets. The plastic pollution crisis is so alarming and we have to do everything we can in our capacity as consumers to stop the demand to produce more plastics. 3) In public markets, you can haggle for prices whereas everything is fixed price in the supermarkets. Now if you are a budget conscious shopper, then a public market suits you perfectly.  The only advantage of supermarkets that I could think of is that they are airconditioned. No, I can't even count that as an advantage,  it only sounds one at first because of the comfort it brings to shoppers, but the confined and enclos

There's just something special about bridges. I mean the the fact that it connects two pieces of land, once separated by bodies of water like rivers or seas, allowing increased life and activities in the points of places it connects. Bridges also symbolizes life transitions. Just as a bridge takes us from one side of a river to the other, life transitions take us from one phase of life to another. Crossing a bridge can also represent a journey of self-discovery and personal growth. As we cross the bridge, we leave our old selves behind and move towards a new, and hopefully improved version of ourselves. Thu Thiem 2 Bridge in Ho Chi Minh City Lately, most of my bike rides are done in the evening. My reduced workload in the university where I teach meant I have fewer commutes to the campus. I have not been getting laundry delivery calls, my side jobs and masters classes are conducted online, so most of my rides recently were really just to hit my weekly fitness targets. Because I did

Most of the time that I'm on bike, I needed to be somewhere. Be it work, grocery, market, restaurant or bank, anywhere else that I have business. I mean that's the whole point of transport or utility cycling, being somewhere you needed to be. But the truth is I don't always have to be somewhere, sometimes I ride the bike without any particular destination, I just needed to work out. That might come as a surprise if you know me because I'm not really an exercisey or a fitness buff kind of person. I only work out to complete my wellness app's weekly fitness challenge. This wellness app is called AIA Vitality. Now full disclosure here, I sideline as an insurance agent for AIA Philippines. Three years ago, at the height of the pandemic, there was a downpour of crowd funding posts in my Facebook feed. So many people are getting hospitalized and a lot of them struggled financially to keep up with the medical bills. It was a wake up call for me. I thought to myself, if I

When I was still studying, I often hear from other people that high school is the best part of a person's academic journey. My teacher once said that during grade school, we're still quite ignorant about much of the real world while during college, we had to be really serious with our studies because the success of our career will heavily be determined by the kind of self-discipline we instilled in ourselves in college. And high school? Well exciting things happen during our adolescent years. We've got a rage of hormones that make us feel all sort of things towards other people. And the good thing about high school was, there's just enough dose of seriousness with our studies and fun with our friends that allows us to have a balanced life. For most people anyway. See, I have always been an introvert and I didn't really have so many friends in high school. My life then was a cycle between home and school. I don't hang out with friends after classes. I bonded with

Love If you have seen the film Eat Pray Love , then you know that Liz met his future husband by getting into an accident while riding a bicycle. Now that's not what makes love better by bicycle okay? That's a horrible way to meet anyone for that matter. In this accident, it was the motorist's (Felipe) fault and if you are following Gilbert's works or life, *spoiler alert* then you know that their marriage had fallen apart after some time. Whatever their reasons were, I'm sure they have nothing to do bicycles or automobiles.                                   Having said that, can I just say that romantic love is highly overrated? Here you'd think she finally had her happy ending, finding the love of her life, as her friend Ketut had foretold, and then 10 years later, they part ways. I blame all the fairy tales and the countless amount of literary materials dedicated to romantic love that made a lot of us fell into a somewhat distorted expectations that somewhere,

Pray I'm not exactly a religious person but I used to be. I was born into a devout Catholic family. I grew up religiously attending mass with my family. We would pray together every night and bless the food with a prayer before eating. My siblings and I attended Catholic school and we joined church related organizations  and activities. I received a New Testament bible at age 8, and I remember reading it during my free time every day even though I couldn't comprehend the meaning of the verses. I have a nun grand aunt and a priest uncle and it was a source of pride among our clan to have kins who heed the clergy calling. When I left home for college, I started to slowly go astray of my religious upbringing. The demands of the academic life made me skip the mass every now and then. But more importantly, my mind was opened with the corruption and hypocrisy  of not just the Catholic church, but almost every organized religion in the world. But I have no plans to leave the church no