A year ago we found out that one of the resident famed billionaires in this third world country, Lucio Tan, bought off the land in front of our building, and is now going to build his own condominium, called Eton Emerald Lofts. They're constructing the building right in front of our own building, and because of this, we are going to eventually lose the majestic view of the city that we currently have.
That said, there isn't really much we can do about that one. Perhaps if I had a truckload of money I'd buy some units from Eton Emerald Lofts (the unit we live in right now is nice, but the truth is I don't own it....I'm just renting it). So one day [with full knowledge that I probably won't be able to afford it] we visited the sales office for Eton Emerald Lofts nearby. What we saw was astonishingly....
...disappointing.
Sometimes I wonder to myself, with all the condominium projects ongoing in Manila, do these ultra-rich tycoons even think about the living conditions that they're subjecting people to? In a nutshell, I was disappointed because the living space in Eton Emerald Lofts is small.
Really, really small. The claustrophobic would probably kill themselves after spending a night in one of their units.
I mean, here's some pics of the unit we were able to rent at AIC Gold Tower:
Notice for the ones with attention deficit disorder: The picture above is NOT a model unit of Eton Emerald Lofts. It's a picture of a unit in AIC Gold Tower. That's just the living room. There are other rooms in there as well. Without going into specifics, here's the hallway leading to the other rooms at our unit in AIC.
If you live in a unit like that, would you buy any of those tiny lofts being offered at Eton Emerald Lofts? If you offered the units at Eton up for rent, who'd be crazy enough to rent from you?
Compared to ETON's supposed 'Lofts'....their units are barely the size of our kitchen! And they're selling those tiny condominium units for some ridiculously expensive prices, too. Ah, the glory of real estate value and speculation....
The size of Eton Emerald Lofts will be impressive, however....over 41 floors, so it will clearly overshadow our own building.
There goes our view :(
Now, since investing in a unit at Eton Emerald Lofts is now completely out of the question (considering the price, size, and quality of the units that they're offering), me and my wife decided that the best way to preserve the majestic view of our condo unit is to take pictures. Lots and lots and LOTS of pictures. We invested in an Olympus E510 10.0 Megapixel DSLR camera with two lenses, proceeded to learn a bit of photography, and then took a truckload of photos.
Yeah, it's quite bulky compared to a point-and-click digital camera...but the pictures it takes are simply stunning!So, yeah, we're starting out with photography. I don't think we're going to be that deep into it, though....but we are having a lot of fun with it. Reading up online, I just found out how expensive photography can get....it's even more expensive than gaming! But there's better official support for taking up photography in the Philippines than for buying a video game console.
Here's a link to some of our photos from the majestic view in AIC Gold Tower.
And here's some samples, too:
Don't worry, we'll get back to console gaming again....just blogging a little bit about real life. We will continue to upload interesting photos at flickr.com....check every so often for more :D There's also a link to our flickr site on the right column of this blog.