Promo Archives, Southology

I know why I love the South… Now tell us why *you* do! Our Southbound promo extended!

By Betty ⋅ February 11, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅

It’s almost Valentine’s Day! That means the deadline for our Why I Love the South promo is fast approaching! But since we’ve decided to give you a little (more like a lot) more time to get your answers ready, we’re extending out deadline to March 31st! (Why am I speaking in oh-so-cheerful exclamatory sentences? I don’t know! I must be excited! Wahahaha!)

OK, enough of the crazy talk. Seriously though, we are extending our promo since we’ve only started to receive answers and we really would like to hear more from you, our Southbound readers. We decided to give it more than a month, so we’d really be able to get out there and gather as many opinions as possible. Plus, we’re planning to come up with some improvements to the site, which should hopefully be out around that time, so our first promo winner comes out in a suitably, er, bongga environment.

So go ahead and review our promo mechanics, not that there are too many details to attend to. You just pretty much decide what you love about the South and let us know! To give you a bit of inspiration, I’ve decided to come up with my own list in the meantime. Feel free to echo some of my sentiments and add your own spin to things (if I mention something you had in mind, go ahead and send us your take on it; I don’t have a monopoly on South lovin’, y’know… ). In fact, when I read the entries that have already been sent in, I find myself nodding in agreement at most of them.

With that, I humbly present the simple, quirky, cheeky, profound, and sometimes downright strange reasons why I love the South…

1. The traffic guy at the corner of Concha Cruz (Standard / Toyota) and Alabang Zapote Road recognizes me and waves hello whenever I turn there.
2. The air just smells different. I mean it. I used to live in Quezon City and at night, the air there smelled like a combination of wet dog and old socks. Here, the air is always fresh, and most of the time it smells vaguely green. That is, if it doesn’t smell like your neighborhood barbecue stand.
3. In the afternoons, when the sun is coming down and making yellow pools of light in my bedroom, I can hear kids playing out in the streets after coming home from school. It reminds me of the days when I used to play shato (is that how you spell it?) and patintero in the streets. You can actually have a normal childhood here, one that includes running around in the dirt.
4. You can go to the mall in flip-flops, shorts, and a ratty t-shirt, not to mention without having taken a bath, and no one will look strangely at you (assuming you don’t stink). In fact, the ones who get odd looks are the people who seem to have pulled out all the stops while getting dressed, coiffed, and made up. We call them “out-of-towners.”
5. When you arrive at home in the middle of the night, you can step out of your car, leave the engine running, open your gate, and dilly dally along the way, watching the stars in the sky and inhaling the fresh night air (see number 2 above), and not worry that someone has snuck into your car behind you and is about to drive off. This is absolutely impossible in areas like Makati or Quezon City unless you live in an exclusive subdivision.
6. Life is more relaxed, in a way that I can’t explain, exactly. It’s not like the pace is slower, since things aren’t exactly slow around here…  it’s just that people seem more laid back, seem to care less about superficial things, and in general care more about a life well-lived.
7. It’s just 30 minutes to Tagaytay. Really. If you drive fast enough.
8. And speaking of driving, I’ve observed that people who live in the South drive faster than usual (owing perhaps to the need to get to work on time, after chronically oversleeping and taking too long to get ready), but for the most part they’re more polite than drivers elsewhere. Notice it takes a while for people to start honking along South Super Highway when there’s a bottleneck. We’ve been properly road-trained, I guess. Perhaps my favorite roads to drive on are SLEX and Alabang Zapote Road (late at night, of course). (As a corollary to that, the roads I hate the most are EDSA, Quezon Ave, and the Elliptical Road in Quezon City).
9. Our City Hall (Las Piñas) has polite employees who can actually answer your questions properly. Processing things there, while still a chore sometimes, is a million times better than in other municipal halls.
10. BF is a complete macrocosm of the rest of the world. You can find absolutely anything you need in there. They have restaurants, stores, spas, business centers, car repair shops, clinics, heck, even a red light district! Now, I don’t exactly approve of all the above, but you’ve got to appreciate the diversity.
11. There are sari-sari stores selling all sorts of things imaginable throughout the most of the villages. I remember spending summers as a kid walking four blocks over to the sari-sari store that sold Tarzan bubble gum. I get so nostalgic when I find Tarzan anywhere these days. (Oh, and another aside: does anyone remember Orange Swits, those things the bus and street vendors used to sell in the old days? They sell them in Puregold Las Piñas.)
12. You can see the sky. The wide open sky. Sometimes I look at it and am awed by the vastness of it all. It reminds me that all the problems in my life (that I tend to take too seriously) are tiny and insignificant compared to the rest of the universe. It sure beats Prozac.
13. People from the South seem to have a distinct personality, or at the very least, some sort of pride at being a Southerner. We band together in ways that are completely spontaneous, or perhaps borrowed from popular culture. Witness the number of people on Friendster claiming they’re from “The South,” “Southside,” “Southside Represezent,” “The Dirty South,” “Southern Comfort,” or whatever else. It may be a large amorphous area, and those who aren’t in it won’t know what it is. But to us Southerners, it’s home. And that’s something we all understand.

Again, a reminder to all: let us know why you love the South and win 300 bucks worth of Starbucks gift certificates and a Southbound shirt! Send in your answers in whatever form (essay, bullet points, pictures, sketches, and anything you feel best expresses your views) via email at southbound.ph@gmail.com. Include some information about yourself: your name, age, gender, location, occupation, industry, and interests. You’ve got until March 31 to do it! But don’t wait till then… do it now! And let the whole world know why you love this place we call home.

« Previous Post: Win 300 Bucks Worth of Coffee and a Southbound Shirt!

Next Post: Gorilla Art - Bigger than chimp-sized drawings »