One interesting spot we passed at Barangay Maasim in San Rafael was a mini-dam built in the middle of the river that runs beside the road.

According to its marker, it was built in 2002 through the aid of Rotary International. It’s a simple enough structure, basically a concrete rampart that traverses the stream’s width. The purpose of the dam entirely escapes me. I guess it might be used to control the river’s flow and the high water utilized as irrigation for the nearby fields, but I’m just speculating here.

We got invited a couple of months ago to a friend’s place in San Rafael, Bulacan. Not really known as a tourist locale, we basically went there just to hang out.

Besides the fact that I pass the town of San Rafael whenever I go to my hometown at Cabanatuan City in Nueva Ecija, I know zero about it. So I consulted Wikipedia. It reported that San Rafael is a first class municipality in Bulacan with agriculture as its main livelihood.

It’s about an hour and a half by bus from Manila and we arrived there late in the afternoon. After a quick snack, we immediately set up the table under mango trees for an impromptu bonding drinking session. But before things got out of hand, we first watched the sun burn the sky to orange at the back lot of our friend’s house which opens to a sprawling newly harvested rice field. It was a quick, but nevertheless, fiery sunset.