Fountain Fascination

I was in Rockwell mall today with the two boys, and of course we had to pay a visit to the jumping fountain on the first floor. The circular, colorfully-tiled Rockwell fountain sends out two to four bursts of water into the air, which then come back down with a splash. The kids love watching the water shoot into the air, and because they're Baz and Hadrien, particularly enjoy the anticipation of waiting for the water to burst from the nozzles.

Which reminds me about the boys' fountain fascination, which I attribute to Baz who passed it on to Hadrien. It was certainly encouraged by Gramps Nas and Gramma Cholly, who'd always take Baz to the cascading ring fountain in Greenbelt across from Baz's first favorite restaurant, Sentro 1771 (where he was enough of a regular that the waitresses recognized him and knew that he preferred the table with the banquette on the far end near the bathroom). Another favorite fountain is the circular one in Shangri-la mall, where Baz first coined his "walk around the fountain" song; and the walk-through ones at Greenbelt 3.



The boys make it a point to draw our attention to different fountains on our usual routes: there's the small single fount under the Buendia flyover as we make our right to Buendia; or if we're on the way to the Gramma's condo there are the Manila Pen fountains at the corner of Ayala and Makati Ave. and the black tiled fountains at the Ayala Museum, on Dela Rosa. On the way home it's the fountain in the driveway of Tektite Tower, which apparently never run for more than a few hours a day, hence sparking a usual debate among the brothers about whether it's "on!" or "off!"



We don't have pictures of these fountains unfortunately, but we should get around to capturing them despite the fact that they are everyday. So while we're doing that I've attached pictures from other places (from above: a fountain in Princeton University; with Daddy, at a fountain in a New Jersey mall; and the fountain in front of the National Archives in Washington DC).



So sure, kids love water, after all. Yet it's refreshing that B and H are fascinated by the manipulation of water - shape and form dictated by forces they can't see and perhaps can't yet explain. They enjoy just the watching, and they're willing to sit and observe how water flows and ebbs through the space, sometimes noisily, sometimes not. Very Zen of them.