THE past few weeks have been like a roller coaster ride with straights on some days and curves, jumps and falls on other days. Why does the month of November become my annual "russian" (rush 'iyan) period? Oh well, I guess it's probably because we are again nearing the holding of the annual national mine safety and environment conference (ANMSEC) here in Baguio City. The 64th edition of the conference will be on November 21-24 and that will be a week after the 31st Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit. Good thing it did not coincide with the summit as it would have sent all the "hot" lowlanders up to our cool and refreshing Baguio and voila - traffic, traffic and traffic everywhere.
I remember back in 2015, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting was held in the same week as the 62nd ANMSEC. It being declared a non-working holiday in Metro Manila, visitors trooped to our city and together with the 3,000 ANMSEC delegates and their family, it literally took me 1 hour to travel by car from Le Monet in John Hay to the Baguio Country Club. That was how bad the traffic situation was then, not to mention that because of the annual mining conference, the vehicle coding in the city was suspended for the whole week.
This year, coding will again be suspended for the mining week. We are hoping that the visitors from the ASEAN Summit holidays would have already left. That leaves us with just the mining conference delegates filling up the streets of the city. It shouldn't be too bad, though, considering that the ANMSEC events will be on weekdays. The 64th version will have as its theme "Responsible Mining... in the Hearts and Minds of Filipinos."
Three weeks away and it appears that we have so much more to do. Blood pressures are soaring and I definitely need some time off - I wish. I'd probably need to just go grab some fresh beer with the tropa, and that includes my just recovered EID - don't worry bunso, there's plenty of fruit in them fresh beer - which means it’s good for you - haha. Three glasses would be fine and that should be the limit, for now anyway. After everything's set and ready, then we can all watch the fireworks, drown in the 30 kegs of draft beer and have a lot of the lechon baka and the special balut from Boss Mon of The Manor.
Cheers!