Never in the annals of history has humanity as a whole agreed on a single thing other than this particular sentiment of how this year that is 2020 has been for all of us.
It sucked.
Suffice to say, our lives altogether were turned upside down thanks to this pandemic, affecting us all in varying degrees of negative effects. As creatures who are designed to roam and to socialize, in one way or another, the pandemic has forced us to limit such actions and interactions.
Being someone who is a professed Urban Roamer, this pandemic has hit me and my work on this site quite hard. Living just outside Metro Manila, you can imagine how hard it was for me to be unable to go to the metropolis like I used to during the first two months of extreme quarantine. Even as the quarantine gradually loosened, public transport was a struggle for a long while. Even now, some of the changes in public transport operations are something I have yet to get used to.
I can imagine it was harder for many businesses that have been struggling since the pandemic hit. More so for the businesses that had to shut down their operations for good. Particularly some notable ones that have been reported in this recent news item.
I felt especially bad for the closure of two businesses, one of them being Kidzania Manila, the indoor amusement park that was long in my bucket list to cover in a potential future post but now will never have the chance to do so. The other one was Oasis Hotel in Paco, Manila, a hotel which I actually stayed in during a birthday staycation holiday in 2013 that I never got to write about, which I now regret considering the amenities it offered at an affordable rate.
The challenges of this year had made me less productive on this site than I wanted to. Nevertheless, I was glad to accomplish some projects that I’m proud to have done this year. One was the UP Diliman series in which I was to cover as much of the campus as I could. But probably the most standout for me this year was the Ayala Center series, in which I was finally able to craft a comprehensive and cohesive story of the area after years in the pipeline.
Also notable to happen this year is that finally I was able to receive the fruits of my site’s monetization after 5 years of doing so. It was a thrilling experience to finally see this site actually worth something. Hopefully, it will not take another 5 years for the next one.
So despite the mess and madness of 2020, personally I still have some things to be thankful for this year. It’s one of the realizations that we have learned from this year, to appreciate even the little good things that have come to us and let them inspire us to move forward in these trying times.
It is a lesson we should keep in mind as we face yet another uncertain year. Of course, we all hope that 2021 will be at the very least, gives us some more good things than the mostly crap that we got on this soon to be over sh!t of a year.
