Blank is #BetterByBicycle

If you know me, then you'd know that I love cafes. I'm not exactly a coffee connoisseur or coffee lover for that matter. At most, on busy days, I'd have two cups a day. That's about it. And I have to take it with sugar and creamer, I can't really take the bitterness of a pure espresso shot. It's just that cafes have a certain alluring and comforting vibe for me. Given that a café is treated as a social lubricant in most cultures, I think my fondness of cafes was influenced by some of the pop culture media that I consumed during my younger years- Friends, Sex And The City, You've Got Mail (my favorite American romcom) among others. When I graduated college, I started to hang out in a lot of café in Metro Manila, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. In many times, coffee shops served as a refuge to my tired soul. Much like how some of Haruki Murakami 's characters used cafes as a quiet space to introspect. There I drowned my sorrows with coffee, tea ...

The Lenten season is a significant time for many Catholics, especially here in the Philippines. It is the time of the year we commemorate the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, reminding us to repent our sins, abstain from worldly pleasures, and reflect how we can  cleanse ourselves to follow Christ's way and deepen our connection to God.  I have seen many changes over the years at the way Filipinos observed the Holy Week. Nowadays it's very different from what I used to experience when I was a child. For example all the economic activity would be on downtime, with stores and businesses shutting operations from Maundy Thursday to Black Saturday, including TV programs. In the past, I used to think of it as the most boring time of the year, with literally nothing to do, not even play. Whenever my siblings would get too loud with our chatter, my mom and grandmother would give that scary  do-you-want-to-go-to-hell look. When I got a little older, I began to understand why ...