the real "dagat ng basura"

ever since Miss You Like Crazy came out, my friends and i have been planning to take the Pasig River Ferry. it didn't even matter to us where the destination was -- we just wanted to experience it (after all, john lloyd did extol its virtues in a conversation with his movie gf).

one weekend, we decided to make a go for it. we had planned on doing a binondo food trip and figured, this would be a good time as any to try getting from one end of the metro to the other through the famed pasig river.

we parked at the tiny parking area (3 cars maximum on one side, not sure if there was parking on the other side) and made it just in time for the 11:07 a.m. trip. it was important that we made it on time -- the next trip was two hours later.

we thought guadalupe would be our best bet - it was accessible to all of us and, having passed by EDSA-guadalupe countless of times, we knew exactly where it was.

i think we had braced ourselves against the smell -- after all, we knew that this was Pasig River and the experience was not going to be anywhere near the Loboc River Cruise. What we hadn't prepared ourselves for was the amount of garbage that we'd see in the hour-long trip.

in fact, even the "famous" lambingan station (we made sure to take pictures of the station although we didn't exactly know where we'd end up had we gotten off this station) was not spared from the trash.

it was, however, good to note that there were areas that were pretty clean. the part of pasig along rockwell, as well as the area near malacanang were almost garbage-free.

i guess the government's efforts to clean up the river are *somewhat* working.

still, with areas *this* thick with garbage, you can't help but regret all those times you took out jolly spaghetti and didn't think twice about where the styro packaging was going to end up in. apparently, some of them end up in pasig river. (note to self: avoid take-out as much as possible beginning today)

still, it was an experience that i did not regret having. after all, how many times have i seen the post office from the other side?

this side, IMHO, is a much, much better view.

the trip was about an hour long -- longer than if we drove from guadalupe to binondo on a weekend (yep. our friends who missed the ferry got to binondo way ahead of us). still, i think having taken the ferry -- which deposited us right at binondo -- made the experience even more memorable had we taken more convenient routes (i.e. car, mrt/lrt, fx).

now, i would have loved to write about the food trip, except that we ended up REALLY hungry already and by the time we thought of whipping out our cameras, everything on our plates were gone.