Cebu weekend

31 October 2012

Cebu Weekend

While no match to Sandy, we were worried Thursday evening that the heavy rains from tropical storm Ofel would impede our weekend trip to visit Fritz’s old college roommate, Hui.  Hui had a long weekend off from her job in Singapore and flew over to meet us near Cebu.  We stayed at Talima on Olango Island, a 20 minute boat ride from Mactan Island, home to Cebu’s airport.  Despite Talima’s good service and beautiful view, we were a bit disappointed at its isolation and lack of walking opportunities.  

We had a friend working in Cebu for the week and decided to spend Saturday exploring the city with her.  We met our friend, Ging, in late morning near an office park and she asked us if we wanted to explore Cebu as tourists or locals.  We opted for the locals’ tour and followed her lead for the rest of the day.  We began with an inasal barbeque lunch.  (Cebu is known for having better food than Manila.)  Inasal refers to the sauce used to marinate and grill bamboo skewers of fresh meat.  We selected our desired partially-cooked cuts of meat—four chicken legs and a fish—and returned to our table while the cooks gave the skewered food a second grilling.  Ging also ordered us a plate of puso—fist-sized portions of steamed rice cooked in woven strips of palm leaves—and a delicious bowl of beef and leek soup.  Our waitress brought over our order of bright red, perfectly charred chicken and fish and we dug in…definitely the tastiest meat we’ve had in the Philippines.  While we still gushing over our delicious lunch, Ging led us a kilometer up the road to Fudge, a gourmet dessert shop, to cap off the meal. 

Sufficiently satiated and completely trusting Ging, we hopped on the backs of two motorcycles.  Before we realized what we had gotten into, Fritz and I were hugging our motorcycle driver closely as we curved up the side of a mountain through the coolest air we’ve felt since our arrival.  After twenty minutes we hopped of our motos and walked through an entrance straight out of The Hobbit to see a breathtaking view of Cebu, Mactan, and Olango islands along with the silhouettes of other provinces.  We waited for a brief shower to pass over before riding on the motos back down the mountains to catch our boat on Mactan back to Olango.  We boarded our Olango-bound Bangka a little after 5pm and soon into our ride we were caught in the middle of windy rainstorm.  We could no longer see Olango and the sun had almost set for the day, but the storm moved through quickly and we safely made it back to Talima for the night.

We had another tasty dinner at Talima: green mongo bean and coconut milk soup with ginger.  We’re still asking around for a local recipe to replicate.  Sunday morning we set out on tricycle for bird watching at Olango Island Wildlife Sanctuary.  Our guide, Socrates, was a wealth of information and helped us identify 18 different species of birds, including the very rare Asian Dowitcher and Chinese Egret. Here are the various birds we saw:

Asian Dowitcher (think we saw 9 of these)

Little Egret

Whimbrel

Far Eastern Curlew

Common Redshank

Common Greenshank

Bar Tailed Godwit

Great Knot

Chinese Egret (saw two of these running around and feeding, really fun to watch since they basically were dancing around the sand)

Gullbilled Tern

Common Tern

Rufous Necked Stint

Mongolian Plover

White Collared Kingfisher

Pacific Swallow

Ruddy Turnston

Grey Plover

Rufous Night Heron (there was one of these that hung out near the main building and was pretty much tame)

When we walked out along the path around 9am as high tide was coming in, all of the stones were above water.  When we returned two hours later, all but the first few were submerged.  As impressed as we were at watching the tide come in, it seems so insignificant now after watching Sandy’s destruction.

We packed up in early afternoon to return to Cebu’s airport and were home around 9pm Sunday evening—another busy yet worthwhile weekend.

Big tuko gecko helped keep away bugs in our hotel room

people parasailing in strait between Olango and Mactan islands

stairs from Talima down to ocean where we would board the bangka

Talima 

little hermit crab hanging out in Talima

one of the many bangkas we could see from Talima

amazing inasal lunch in Cebu with Ging and Hui

looking down towards Cebu from Busay

Cebu, Mactan island behind it

rain coming in

lots of orchids tied to trees in wildlife sanctuary

walking out to viewing station. Lots of fish and crab activity in water around walkway

with Socrates, the guide

tide starting to cover walkway back to shore

Using Socrates' scope to look at dozens of birds pushed together as the tide rises. They were too far away to photograph with my camera.

heading back as tide rises

viewing station. Saw almost 20 different species of birds from this one spot

tame rufous night heron

some of the larger crabs that were hanging out on the rocks

U.N. Day

29 October 2012

            On the morning of October 24 at about 6:30am we heard a commotion outside. This was not an unusual occurrence: on the previous Saturday, for example, we heard a marching drum ensemble playing loudly at about 6:00am to lead a big parade from the Barangka Credit Cooperative. They were celebrating the opening of a new Credit Cooperative building over in Quezon City.

            Since this latest noise included the sounds of drums and glockenspiels I grabbed my camera and went out to the roof of our building to see what was going on. As we found out later from asking around, it was United Nations Day and the Barangka Public School from down the street was having a big parade. It seems like hundreds and hundreds of children had been assigned to represent a particular country in the parade. Two of them were dressed in costume that was meant to represent their nation and they marched behind other students carrying a national flag. The other children behind them would chant U.N.-appropriate slogans such as “We Want Peace! We Want Peace!” or “Let’s Go Ireland/Egypt/U.S.A, etc.” Apparently many elementary schools around Manila did similar activities. Here is a segment of our video that captures only a small part of this seemingly never-ending parade.  

"Walk This Way": More musings about pop music

23 October 2012

World's Biggest Shoes

This post begins with a shoe sale. Marikina City, our newly adopted hometown, is known as the Shoe Capital of the Philippines since it produces a large number of shoes. The famous Shoe Museum that displays part of Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection is here. The world’s largest shoes are housed in the Marikina Shoe Gallery in nearby Riverbank mall (size 753). So we were not too surprised to discover this past weekend that there was a shoe festival going on at various locations throughout Marikina. Most of the festival, it seemed, revolved around the “Walk This Way” shoe sale. We saw banners for this all over the place, including the relatively quiet street near our apartment that borders a large cemetery.

Ad for shoe sale

Statues of carabao along Marikina River

            In part to investigate this shoe sale (both of us were in the market for a new pair since we packed lightly) and in part to finally explore the nearest big mall in our neighborhood, we walked along the Marikina River to SM City Marikina. We were greeted at the entrance with a giant green high-heeled shoe-cycle.

Walking to SM City Marikina across Marikina River

In front of SM City Marikina entrance

Just past the entrance, a band of six Filipinos were performing with at a deafening volume. Quite appropriately, when we entered they were playing Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,”  (it would have been more fun had they done Run-DMC’s version but no such luck). After this song, the leader began his patter for the seated audience and new arrivals, hawking the shoe sale and the SM brand. He and his band had clearly studied late 1960s James Brown quite closely; even his bassist was in on the act to add “yeah!” when appropriate. They transitioned into JB’s “I Feel Good” before continuing on with tunes recorded by African-American male singers in the late 1960s (The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, etc.). The singer kept his JB rasp, albeit toned down, for the rest of the set, even when performing one of Al Green’s biggest hits. The band was good and they were working hard, even in this cavernous room amidst a bunch of shoppers, wandering shoe mascots, and giant trampolines. This encounter made me think about the widespread and much-discussed idea of Filipino “mimicry.”

Care to buy some shoes?

entertainment next to the band

Much of the discourse about popular music in the Philippines centers on the trope of Filipinos as premier imitators, as dead ringers for American singers. A common move is to call somebody “the so-and-so of the Philippines.” The singer in the video above, for example, might be known as “the James Brown of the Philippines.” Nicknames like these have been around for quite some time, and are often embraced by the performers themselves. For example, Katy de la Cruz was often described as the “Sophie Tucker of the Philippines” during the 1920s. During the 1930s, Filipino radio stars with these sorts of nicknames would fool American tourists tuning in that a whole host of American singers had relocated to Manila.

The simple and obvious problem with this trope of imitation, though, is that it denies any sort of creative agency or thinking. This issue has been around for a long time. For example, in El Filibusterismo (1891), Rizal gives one of his Spanish characters the following opinion about Filipinos:

Since he [Don Custodio] professed to be a liberal he would, when he was asked what he thought of the natives, answer condescendingly that they were fit for mechanical work and the ‘imitative arts’ (by which he meant music, painting and sculpture)…(169).

A few pages later, Don Custodio expands upon this idea to his colleague:

“Nothing can be original, nothing should be allowed to be original, as far as the natives are concerned. Do you follow me? I have a great liking for them, but one must not praise them for anything; that only encourages and spoils them (170).”

This kind of colonial mentality of racial others mechanically imitating forms of music or art has been used all over the world (for example, read any descriptions of slave music in the U.S.).

Whiteman

Of course, when a musician embraces such a title like “The James Brown of the Philippines,” it could also be seen as a marketing strategy, a way to assure audiences of a certain quality and content of their performance. In the 1920s, for example, many musicians hoped to draw on the celebrity of Paul Whiteman to find more work. Whiteman lent his own name to satellite bands that traveled around the U.S. and worked on Atlantic cruise ships. Other musicians took his name, too. Among them were the Paul Whiteman of the West (Jean Goldkette), the Paul Whiteman of New England (the Starita Brothers), the Paul Whiteman of the East (Jack Carter), and the Paul Whiteman of the Orient (Whitey Smith). Instead of merely imitating Whiteman, these musicians were probably just using his name as a point of reference to listeners.

Still, there is a difference between calling someone “the so-and-so of the Philippines” and having a musician adopt that nickname for their own gain. I’m on the lookout here for this sort of language and have already found many cases where people embrace the idea that Filipinos have some innate talent for singing American songs.