Manila gets torrential rain on top of bad sewers, so water can rise to knee height within an hour. Baguio gets rain that doesn't stop for two weeks, which causes a lot of soil erosion. The rainy season is almost over, though. El Niño has already started, so it should be sunny all the way before the end of October.

There's no monsoon season as such. It just rains for days on end sometimes. A nor'easter is a storm with strong winds, more like a hurricane.

At the peak of the monsoon, it's raining 70 to 80% of the time for two weeks straight. Mostly downpours.

I've never been through a nor'easter (I'm from the other coast), but the rainy season here is much longer. What to expect depends on exactly where you'll live. Obviously it rains a lot everywhere, but some regions take the brunt of storms while others usually escape the worst. Outside places like BGC, flooding is a major concern.

Haha, kind of, but not really. A nor'easter is a different beast. Yours is cold, windy and gray for a few days, then it moves on. Our rainy season is warm rain that goes on for months, roughly June to October or November depending on where you are. Nobody here wears a heavy coat. You're sweaty and wet at the same time, which is a special kind of misery of its own lol. On a normal day during habagat (the southwest monsoon), mornings are usually sunny or muggy. Then the sky goes dark in the afternoon and it pours for an hour or two, sometimes with crazy thunder. After that it clears up like nothing happened. The problem is flooding, especially in Metro Manila. The drainage can't keep up, so even 30 minutes of heavy rain can turn some streets into rivers, and the already bad traffic gets much worse. When a typhoon passing nearby pulls in the monsoon, you can get days of nonstop rain, and that's when it gets really bad. Then there are the typhoons themselves, which are closer to your hurricanes than to a nor'easter. About 20 a year enter the Philippine area, though not all of them make landfall or hit hard. For me the worst was Ondoy in 2009. Ask anyone from Manila. It dumped about a month's worth of rain in less than a day. Whole neighborhoods in Marikina and Pasig went underwater, and people were stranded on their roofs. I was stuck at a friend's place for two days because the roads were impassable. Everyone from that time has an Ondoy story. Carina in 2024 brought back a lot of those memories too, since Manila flooded badly again. The one that hit the country hardest was Yolanda (Haiyan) in 2013. That was more about wind and storm surge in Tacloban and the Visayas, and it was catastrophic. If you're visiting or moving here, don't let this scare you off. The rainy season is perfectly livable, and plenty of locals actually love the cooler weather. Just bring a good umbrella and slippers or sandals you don't mind getting soaked (forget nice shoes), stay out of floodwater because of leptospirosis, and check PAGASA when a storm is coming. Hang in there with your nor'easter and stay dry!