D U M A ! ! !

Coming from Iloilo visiting Dumaguete to see my nephews in Silliman (the elder having just graduated cum laude), I was surprised to see a St. Paul University there; this revelation initiated by the monument on the boulevard to the 7 nuns from Chartres, France who came in at the start of the 20th Century (yes, that’s last century) to found the school.  Iloilo has its own St Paul University and interestingly enough, it was the archbishop of Jaro who assigned the nuns here.  However, further browsing on the web revealed that SP Duma predated SP Ilo by a good 7 years (1904 vs 1911) so I can surmise the nuns probably came straight from somewhere but Iloilo.  (See separate site for pics)

The speculation is stoked, the curiosity aroused.  Here are seven nuns in French convent habits, pointing this way and that, and as they landed on the beach, “joyously welcomed” by the locals (though I suspect this had more to do with the prospect of good French wine and cheese than on better NCLEX scores).  I don’t know about you, but I am not inclined to joyously welcome the education of my kids by nuns who should know better than to wear black, close-necked, long-sleeved habits, and go island-hopping in the tropics.  And with hats like those, the small rickety wooden boat probably didn’t need any sails.  As a matter of fact, the good Archbishop of Jaro probably intended them to come to Iloilo, not Dumaguete.  It was those darn hats that got them caught in some intertropical convergence zone and blew them south to this “Land of Gentle People.”

And gentle the people the Dumagueteños are.  And welcoming of tourists and strangers.  Such is the usual case of simple decent provincial folks on the throes of urban sophistication.  We can only hope this balance is maintained at least in my lifetime (hey, everyone has the right to have an ipod and a pair of avayanas at some point down the road, in due time, in due time). But I digress.

It wasn’t exactly a very smooth journey (roro sched mixup, road repairs, road slips and landslides in belatedly discovered overinflated tires), all i wanted to do upon arriving was to lie down for a good nap, which is what i actually did for two hours after i dropped my luggage.

Rizal Blvd with the prerequisite Chow King.

I only stayed for 2 nights and one whole day, not enough for the sites outside town but just right to take in what the city has to offer.  Duma does what the rest of the Philippine cities should be doing: preserve old buildings and make them self-supporting and viable operations.  It has done so very well in Rizal Boulevard (1914) by the bay.  Admittedly some have been turned into bars where, to paraphrase DWF writer Jane Austen, “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a retired white man man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a local brown wife.”  But still.

Thursday.  After breakfast at MacDo (sige, smirk ka dyan), we went to the city plaza to visit the Tourism Office and to do some household shopping at the ubiquitous Unitop.  Across the other side of the plaza, the cathedral has gone through several reconstructions since it was established in 1811, a full two and a half generations before Jose Rizal (my constant 19th century chronological benchmarks, thanks to Yoyoy Villame).  The campanario or belfry started even earlier (1760), as one of four watchtowers used to warn locals of marauding pirates coming to plunder and pillage, or in the local dialect, “dumagit.”  Geddit, geddit?!?!   With a well-visited grotto at the foot of the belfry where the pious and the faithful light candles, adjacent to it on the church grounds is an FRT (Foot Reflexology Therapy) center manned by volunteers.  With some trepidation and hesitation, my nephew and I tried it.  They say in Eastern culture, if it hurts, it’s good for you.  If so, what we had then was probably very good for us.  As nice as Ms. Emily was, she was also quite a chatterbox, punctuating each painful stab of her evil stick with a declaration of the corresponding body part that she allegedly just stimulated.  It took a lot of courage and restraint to keep an expression of calm indifference especially when she attacked the “testicular” and “genital” meridiens on my sole, though I must admit I wasn’t so sure how to react when she got to the part for the, um, “vas deferens.”

After that and a good lunch at the local student population’s favorite chicken barbeque place, we went back home to rest and play some more with the dogs and the day-old calf (see pics).  Then, we were off to Silliman Univ to check my nephews’ school.  A pretty pleasant place to walk around in, especially the area around the Library and the Henry Luce Auditorium (yes, he who found Time Magazine).  Frisbee seems to have taken a good hold in here, with some students taking a year off just to throw it.  Wanted to have some coffee at the campus’ own cafe’ fronting the bay.  Evidently a lot of <fingers doing the quote unquote> cool people  go there for their lattes, but my nephews begged to disagree.  They say the really cool people in Silliman don’t go for wimpy coffee.  They take Red Horse.  At 10 A.M.  With their professor.

Next stop was Centrop, the zoo by the uni where the two main residents are the white spotted deer and the warty hog – both endangered species (with names like that, they could use a really big tube of Canesten).  What they also need is more funding, though the very spare staff do a very good job of keeping the place going.  The partly unkempt grounds though is part of its charm – this is a forest as it should be, impressively old and stately trees with the grounds full of fallen leaves and outgrowth.  It was baking hot in the parking area but 15 meters away, it felt cool and pleasant under the canopy of the trees.

Rolling towards dinner had us at another sugba place.  But before doing so, we had to get some of the famous sans rival before it closed at 7, dining customers be damned.  I need not tell you, the joint is named, um, San Rival, but I’d understand if they imposed a sin tax on that thing, it’s that good.  One other thing I note is that a lot of locals do patronize the food joints for their regular meals, unlike Iloilo where the general rule has been you had to have an excuse or a good reason to eat out.  Iloilo might be more of the exception here, but this probably explains the good number of good value lutong-bahay (home cooked) places around.  Last stop, the Spanish coffee shop that started out simply as a catering business but had the good sense to convert the old wooden house into an open dining cafe’ complete with wooden swinging seats.  A mysterious white lady floating about would not look out of place in this joint, and it wouldn’t surprise me if those 3 coeds seated on the next table were never really there.

The next morning, with foreboding clouds and with the Cebu leg of the trip cancelled, we packed up and headed back.  We did make another stop at the Chan estate, a short but stop-on-your-driving-tracks stretch framed by moss-covered trees that arch over the road.  Formerly owned by the Tabacalera group, the estate has ten 19th century style mansions spread out all over the grounds on both sides of the street. Yes, it’s the Chan family as in Jose Marie Chan, he of the unforgivably sappy songs they use at Guantanamo Bay as and “enhanced interrogation technique,” he who is a regular in the alumni fundraising circuit, thereby ensuring the continuance of this vicious cycle.  The Janet Basco Suite at the Hotel Hades awaits him.

And so my blog entry on Duma ends.  My second nephew still has two years to go; I shall be back this time hopefully with my nieces in tow, and with enough time and planning to visit the lakes, the falls, the caves and other wonders Duma has kept for me to visit and explore.  (blurby enough for a tourism ad?)

For the pics and the captions, please check my photo link. (Work in progress.  Anybody recommends a good photo site?)

Kung Hey Mai Fut!

Kong Xi Fa Tsai!

“Uragon ka man! Taw-an ka nin Dios ki masaganang taon!”

Imagine:  You are a decent, quiet, hardworking, patriotic Ilonggo with a 2.5 bedroom thingy in one of Manny Villar’s pastel-colored suburban sprawls.  Your wife’s on the way,  you just got a Mitsubishi Adventure and a Magic Sing, with an extra memory chip for good measure.  Fuel prices just came down another half a peso.  Life is good.  The Dinagyang’s ongoing and the Lunar New Year’s a-coming.  Suddenly, a friend you’ve recently seen but don’t really care for much drives by in a Ford SUV and greets you, “Uragon ka man! Taw-an ka nin Dios ki masaganang taon!”

That my friend is as jarring a greeting as we decent, hardworking, patriotic Fujianese get when we hear “Kong Hei Fat Choi!” every time Chinese New Year (CNY) rolls along our way.  The Fujianese comprise nearly 90% of the Chinese population in the Philippines (sez me) and it doesn’t feel quite right to be greeted by well-meaning brown locals in a dialect belonging to a Chinese province down south associated with sooty factories-turned-snooty colony, in the same way that Ilonggos are jarred with a Bicolano greeting. Add to that, the newspapers and morning shows stepping over each other with animalistic predictions for the coming year.  And it certainly doesn’t help my cause a bit that the local Chinaman slash hardware store owner suddenly morphs into a feng shui expert, traipsing around town in a red and gold jacket, dangling tacky gold plastic trinkets with red tassels, advising anyone who cares to listen (and that’s all of us) which way to face when we sit and do our business.

For generations, Filipinos have been doing Hong Kong more frequently than is good for them, imbibing everything Cantonese that came their way, including a disproportionate desire for name-brands and one-upping the other.  Maybe it’s the British colonial background, maybe it’s the fact that ole’ London town is simply too bloody far away, but here we are, having become in some respects a colony of a former colony.

While I certainly don’t mind Cantonese cuisine, can’t get enough of the Bank of China and HSBC skyscrapers and continue to be fascinated by CX and the CLK airport, I am (by blood and for this article’s sake) a true blue Fujianese (with a healthy dose of Ilonggo-flavored Filipino mixed in).

So it is therefore an affront to us decent, hardworking, patriotic Fujianese to be greeted in some minor dialect of some minor former provincial outpost of some has-been colonial power.

Having said that, I full-heartedly (and foolhardily) add my voice into the snowballing, international movement (remember folks, you heard it here first!) to greet in proper pudonghua every Chinese New Year, as in “Kong Xi Fa Tsai,” or as they put in Pinyin, “Gong Xi Fa Cai.”  (A strange way to spell it but it’s the proper pinyin way, deviously designed to make white bumbling foreigners sound funny when they speak Chinese.  But that, as they say, is another story.)

For CNY, a decent, hardworking, patriotic Fujianese reporting.

What It Means To Be A Racist. Or To Be Called One.

Dateline: January 20, 2009.  8pm Iloilo, 7am Washington DC.

Dinner at home with my parents.  Made it a point to watch CNN for
the O inauguration, and my mom in all her aged, senioriffic innocence made a
comment that is now part of the family’s lore. “Is it dark in there or
is it because there are so many black people around?”

Now you may label that statement any way you want to, but it
was a factual, honest comment from my mother, an Asian
immigrant of a generation ago.

Meaning to share it with my friends, i texted it in the spirit of
shared humor to a few of them, leaving moral judgment to hang in
the air.  By actually doing so, I may have revealed about my views more than
i intended to, but as expected, the responses came rapid and
rabid, and in turn, revealed in my mind, a lot more about the
people who did reply than they wanted to as well.

It was an anecdote that Chris Rock or Eddie Murphy would have made themselves in a comedy routine; this wasn’t even from a stereotyped oppressor class.  They say that an advantage of a minority is that you can get away with the jokes.  But this was different.  This was from another minority (in more levels than one) made in reference to another, with my own mother as an unintentional protagonist.

I was called a racist by a few, some in the spirit of fun, some i would gather from the limits of the text medium, a seriously toned reprimand.  Now, at this point, I am not one to be fazed by these responses but it got me to think how one text message could elicit such a wide spectrum of responses.  Some, in all earnestness, took to explain the time difference, the late sunrise in the western hemisphere, the cold hazy weather.  Even the bad cable tv reception.  Or that it was broadcast in black and white for dramatic effect.  It wasn’t.  Most sent back a short, simple “Ha ha!” confirming a shared moment in private humor.  My favorite: “Neither. Oprah just arrived.”  I will not tell anyone to loosen up, much less get a life.  But i must say that it struck me that it was a serious affront to their sensibilities.  Sus ah!

The Obamas and the Bushes are getting off the new First Car as I finish off this entry, riding from one building to another.  Even before the primaries, I believed Clinton was a better candidate but Obama has gone beyond what I expected from him, and it’s all to his credit that he’s starting to make me question my original opinion.  An article today from the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20transition.html?hp) puts very well why he has the right approach to start off as the leader of the United States of America.  It is doubly fortunate to have Clinton and Obama, but had been doubly unfortunate as well for the two Bushes that came their way.

But i remain optimistic.  I am not an American citizen but I will be, in some indirect way down the road, be positively affected by what I hope will be a new age in America and the world.

Sige na, ma speech na si Obama.  Namaste!

My Monthsary

And so marks my first month back home in the province, actually a month and 4 days, it just didn’t occur to me that I can write a bit about it.

They Olympics have come and gone: from the drama of buying my father an LCD TV for this purpose and seeing it break down (Viewsonic) and having to buy another one (Samsung), to the fantabulous Opening Ceremonies and subsequent fake elements (I knew it!  That little girl couldn’t sing!), to Michael Phelps’ making pakyaw the gold medals, to Liu Xiang’s pained withdrawal (he shouldn’t have gone out there in the heats to start with, but with a coach bawling like that, maybe he had to), to my fearless prediction that synchronized swimming is the sport of the future for very evident reasons (but that’s another posting), the drama and excitement was indeed worth sitting on our collective bottoms for.

As I continue with our family business and try to keep alive my struggling one, I find myself much busier here than I was in the big, bad city.  Too busy to do stuff that I had resolved to (gym, catch up on reading, some academic work on the side, blogging, and charity volunteering).  Maybe as I force myself to work on these things and offer no excuses, I can get some progress by Christmas time.

So here you are, a blog posting to cross one out of my checklist.  (this blog needs work!  i can’t even control which groupings some articles go to.  oh well, i’ll think about that tomorrow.  tomorrow is another day.

Hark The Insular Life Lightboard!

While the remodeling of the Insular Bank building is a change for the better, the avowed objective of the fancy, new “lightboard” is suspect.  Press reports have it that it will only show good news.  Good news?

What constitutes good news?  Gas prices coming down 1.5 after increasing more than 20 the past months?  The Philippine economy doing better than Burma and Sierra Leone?  Leah Salonga in yet another standing ovation?  Sulpicio Lines finally getting someone to float the ship without damaging the sea corrals?

Who decides what’s good news anyway?  One’s good news is another man’s bad.  Paquiao’s victory is what’s-his-name’s and his country’s shame (though let me be clear about this – beating another man black and blue till his eyes nearly pop out and he can’t stand by himself is revolting and certainly no cause for national celebration).  Mon Tulfo’s bad news is Mike Arroyo’s cause for rejoicing.  Obama”s victory is Clinton and Bush’s worry (though I am not so sure about the latter basing on some conspiracy blogs.  Hey, that 8.1 earthquake was a no-show, but that’s another story).

So who?  Let me guess.  Nonong Pedero, Alejandro Roces & Sonny Ramirez teaming up to tweak the knobs, to cut and paste, to cook and baste so all who drive through Paseo de Roxas are cheered up with hourly quotes of empowerment (half-hour during rush hour).  Dolly Ann Carvajal, Ricky Lo & Boy Abundant dishing out celebrity dirt, on the premise that any celebrity’s dirt helps my linen look cleaner.  Or maybe Conrado Banal, Ron Nathan and Victor Agustin throwing us those morsels of self-enrichment that leaves the clerk on his/her way to hop on the crowded bus to Novaliches no choice but to laugh in self-mockery but grieve in his/her soul.

I say, Give us a break!  We don’t need good news.  We need news, period.  Don’t pretend to be Big Brother.  Or at least, let us not delude ourselves with the belief that by reading good news often enough, we can put a stop to the bad.  Or to put it bluntly, we cannot stop a gangrenous left limb by focusing on the healthy right.

At any rate, I find it interesting that more than a month after i see it installed and in running condition, it remains either dark, or blank (if lit).  When dark, but one little light on the lower right corner is aglow – one good news among the deluge of bad ones?  Or maybe at this time, there really is no more good news worth reading?

Now that’s good news for the vultures on the lines, but bad news for the rest of us.

At the end of the day, it does make a lot of sense that the company (Insular Life) that earns on our fears of the unexpected, tries to take our minds off what is inevitable.

(As i was posting this, a chanced on a new NYT article saying that granite countertops have considerable levels of radiation, about 10x the norm.  Now is that news hot or what?  There goes my kitchen remodelling plans).  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/garden/24granite.html

Taiwan, Baguio

(WIP – pics to post)

The past month had given this writer the opportunity to travel some more than than the Iloilo trip the last time. To Taiwan and Baguio, as a matter of fact.

Taiwan (Aug 18-23) had always been a regular destination ever since I worked there for a good number of years, and the place has grown into a more mature and confident place than when I stayed there in the 90s (that is last century!). I say that because as the world turns its back politically on Taiwan, Taiwan has shown a more “I don’t care” attitude about it – The world may think so much of China, but that doesn’t mean we cease to exist. And exist well, prosperously and at peace. Commerce seems to be booming, the MRT system buzzes along with the busybees that are the Taiwanese people to-ing and fro-ing about.

A pleasant surprise came into view as my plane descended on Taoyuan airport – windmills! The huge, white, towering types that I saw in science articles are now, with very little fanfare (or simply because I am not in Taiwan), “planted” along what I assume would be the eastern coast (I counted 20 but google says there are more than a hundred now, enough for 105,000 households. Imagine turning on the aircon, browsing the web, while the tv is on, and the coffee pot’s percolating, all from free electricity!) Perfect that I was bringing with me super howler Egay, aka Sepat. It was fretfully anticipated but that didn’t stop me from directly proceeding to the electronics market across the train station and put down an order for an Acer TravelMate notebook and a Benq digital camera.

And what a howler it was! The next day, I knew before leaving my friend Pablo’s house that to carry an umbrella would risk me flying away like Mary Poppins so I stuck through with my nylon jacket. Sure enough, I could barely hold on to my own body against the wind. Ever see cartoon characters Rage! Rage! against the wind, headlong with their arms flailing behind them? Well, walking beside some tall buildings that had a funneling effect, I certainly did look like those ‘toons, but this time, it wasn’t very funny.

Fortunately, the rains only lasted two of the five days I stayed there. Pablo, recently married June of this year, had moved to a new place in Beitou, and there I was in the new guest room with a computer and a DSL connection! In a quiet side street, next to a police station and community center, a short distance to local eats (my favorite fan-thuan!), by the hills, next to a creek, a short distance to very well developed hiking trails: his place couldn’t be more feng-shui auspicious. Good friend, Lily, who now tutors local kids in English seems pretty well settled, a lifestyle so different than what she had before, and quite evidently so much better for her.

A few of the errands I had planned to work on this trip went undone, but intentionally; better decisions I would think. The stock market is down, and I don’t think I’m getting any younger so liquidating some of my stocks and canceling my health insurance may not be prudent things to do. As for the LCD TV I promised my Dad (or rather, I promised myself I’d get for my Pop), the Beijing Olympics is still many months away, and by then, prices would still inch down a bit. And that makes another trip back to Taiwan in the horizon. As a friend and I always say, let’s make a trip that needs a reason.

= = = = = =

Baguio (Aug 31 – Sept 1)

My Cervini (college dorm) graduating class college retreat was the last time I’ve been to Baguio – most memorable for the facts that what was supposed to be a silent retreat ended up being a mini party interspersed with some memorable dramatic moments, courtesy of some Eliazo (the female dorm) residents.

So there we were, some friends and I, driving up north with a stopover at the Shrine of our Lady of Manoag. Thanks to aforementioned Egay slash Sepat, a declared holiday meant that i got leave credits to push through with Baguio.

Congested would be an apt term for Baguio, an opinion I’ve heard repeatedly from other people. Even so, the treats that Baguio offers still makes it worth the trip: the views, the fresh air and the cool weather, the Pink Sisters convent (should go back for the singing, kuno), Mine’s View and the fresh food market (though pesky vendors is one thing they can have less of). Even so, we do note that they have much less beggars than the good ole’ metropolis of Bayani Fernando, and mostly, everyone seems to at least try to eke out a living by vending something. But yes, we also do note that asking for directions from the ordinary man on the street is not such a productive exercise, which we conclude, comes from the fact that it has a very high transient population – which begs the question, if everybody is trooping to Baguio, where did the real old-time local residents go?!?

Oh, I must mention as well that our stay at the Baguio Country Club was quite pleasant, save for particular incidents of bad, unprofessional service from the front desk and restaurant staff. But when the service is good, as it was in the coffee shop where they sell the justly famous raisin bread, it was exceptional and memorable (a banana cake-tasting offer turned into full-service, sit-down affair with a gorgeous view when we told them we are waiting for a carwash to finish). That did translate to a Php980 bakery purchase, so it was the right thing for them to do, sucker customer that I am.

So there, a couple of thousand bucks poorer, but all the happier for having made that trip, we got back to Manila with a resolution to do it again in the future, this time with lesser trips to SM Baguio, please.

My Very First Time: Blame Canada

(Originally posted on Friendster, brought over to Blogspot, now in WordPress. Searching for the user friendliest blogsite, one that can read my mind and write the blog for me. In the meantime, I hope this one lasts as long as my Globe Handyphone contract)

Okay, so everybody and his mother has a blog and maybe I should have one too (since when did bad logic go out of fashion).

This isn’t my first attempt. During an aborted trip to Canada last summer, I started one in blogspot and was on a roll. I even had “Blame Canada” as my title (South Park BLU movie song) and i thought it particularly witty. On to my third paragraph, power outage hit the office and just like that, all three paragraphs of literary brilliance and erudite sensibility went to the ether and nether of the wide wide web. Consider that a portent of things to come and sure enough, the trip didn’t push through. I had to stay and work that summer. My friends push through with the trip but I’m sure they didn’t enjoy it.  I mean, Canada ain’t that.  The weather is cold, the food is bland, the mosquitoes big and the electronics expensive.  To top it all that, they actually love Celine Dion!

Now, does anyone really bother reading blogs? I would think that trawling the web for blog postings is a rather pathetic way of wasting perfectly good internet bandwidth (should be used to download pirated music and vids, noh?), but in friendster’s case, they can make it available only within your circle of friends, so i suppose there is that element of strengthening alliances in reading them – you were friends then, and reading each other’s blogs now makes you even better friends, not?

Would you like to read what I think of Trinoma, Fantastic 4 and Die Hard 4? I guess not. And so you won’t. Because I will not write about them. So what will I write about? Frankly, I don’t have the faintest idea. I’m pleased enough that on a slow noon, on my lunch break, i got to post four paragraphs without Eugenio Lopez going down on me.

Namaste.