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.

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