Writing this blog while soaking my feet in steaming hot water bath. It's supposed to be good for colds. The idea is that you want to heat up the body as much as possible. Eat/drink hot food. Actually, dipping my feet into the water made me shiver as if reminded at how cold I was.

This Sunday is filled with passion! Specifically the Palm Sunday passion.
Palm Sunday is one of my favorite masses because you get Palm leaves. I'm not really sure what the Palm leaves symbolize. I just remember getting them and watching my mom tear the leaves then weave them into a zig-zag pattern. You start off by separating the leafy parts from the central spine leaving a bit at the bottom together. It takes me a few minutes to remember how to do it. So now you have two thick pieces with a stiff string down the middle which you weave fold, flip, fold over, keeping the center string intertwined in throughout to keep it together. Lastly you tie it off. It's meditative...relaxing.

I don't usually go to church, but I like this time of year. I can understand why Filipinos are into religion, it's all about the drama and there's nothing more dramatic than the end of the Lenten season. The theme for today's mass is the capture of Jesus by the Romans and the all memorable line, "God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" See, even the Son of God has his bad days.

Filipinos LOVE Easter. Usually the international news covers this. There's an area in the Philippines where people literally go through Jesus' stations of the cross AND get nailed to the cross in their hands. They stand on a platform, so there's no weight pulling on it. Many of them have their own reasons for going through it: some have ill relatives, others were former convicts. It's the idea of being able to endure such torment yet finding hope at the end.