Old school memories: Boarding house

Anyone who is from the province and has gone to school in the city knows what "boarding house" means. It practically means adjusting to living conditions in the city, which could range from cramped to hot with less privacy and of course adjusting to the other occupants who are also from the province with the same predicament. It also means choosing to buy or rent a whole apartment unit for the well-off probinsyano or sharing a room with someone else like the hillbilly from Bukidnon.

For the first year, I stayed in two different boarding houses - Rolling Hills and Adams Center. I shared the small room with a handsome Indonesian who was a classmate in my pre-med years. In the second year I moved to a bigger room in Adams with 4 other medical students and this is where things got interesting. This was a motley bunch with two older guys and 3 same-batch-in-college guys, and at one time or another all five of us were together in MVC. Boarding house blues like keeping the room clean, checking for bed bugs - which netted more than a dozen, trying to sleep when others still needed the lights on, coming home to find a blond German in bed with one of the guys (he thought that he had secured the door), helping ourselves to a ripe durian high in a tree outside the building in spite of a noisy chicken watching over it, taking out empty beer bottles that have accumulated in one corner, straining the eyes in the darkness to see who the lady companion is when one guy comes home and silently enters the room in the wee hours of the morning after the lights are out, etc. were some of the things that made my stay in Adams memorable.

The third year found me getting bed-space at the dormitory behind Brokenshire Memorial Hospital so that I wouldn't have to commute for duty. Meals were at a small house turned resto at the sloping area behind the hospital.

For my fourth and final year, I moved to my ex-girlfriend's house in Ledesma village beside our school at Bacaca. She wouldn't let me stay anywhere else since we already signed our contract for marriage. This setup was ideal for me because I didn't have to worry anymore about meals, laundry or finding time to visit her. Prior to this move I would get on a bicycle to visit her 5 kilometers away at about 11:00 in the evening when my eyes were tired of reading. It was also around this time of the night when her dad would come home and we would use his car to drive to the city for a midnight snack. Sometimes it would be raining or I was too busy to pay her a visit, but I know that towards midnight I'll hear a car honk and my roommates would clap their hands in delight knowing that there is some pizza or ice cream brought by Jo ann for our snacks. 

These are some of the memories of my boarding house life in medical school that I will treasure.