F&G: January 2013

30 January 2013

Cultural Center of the Philippines

We’ve been back in Marikina now for 10 full days after our trip to Indonesia and are happy to be settling back into our routine. Last Monday I took the 80-minute trip down to the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) both to look at their library and to try to get tickets to a revival of the musical Katy, a musical biography of Katy de la Cruz, one of the biggest vaudeville stars of 1920s Manila. The library did not have much relevant material for my work but I managed to get some of the last tickets to the Sunday matinee show, the last day of its performance.

We had a fairly normal week after that. I started going down to the National Library (again, about an 80 to 90 minute commute) to start going through their massive collection of sheet music. It will probably take me a few weeks to get through it all. On Sunday, we went down to the CCP to watch Katy. The performers were all phenomenal and the music and staging was quite good. It was fun to see some of the recreations of a cabaret scene or a vaudeville show. As we were leaving, we had to cross through a giant religious procession that was going down the main road and that tied up traffic for blocks and blocks. Fortunately, we were taking the train so it didn’t slow us down too much.

guys trying to get their float through traffic to the procession

Our friend John, who had been traveling with us in Indonesia, had also come to the Philippines. Instead of staying in Manila, though, he went down to Anilau, Batangas to take a scuba certification course and then went on down to Legazpi, where he did a two-day hike of Mt. Mayon. He flew back up to Manila on Monday since he was flying back to the U.S. on Wednesday.

We showed him some of the highlights of our neighborhood on Monday night and Tuesday, including chocolate-carrot cake at Xocolat, a walk through Ateneo’s campus, lots of yummy street food, an Ilocano empanada from a stand on Katipunan, a tour of SM Marikina (our local major mall), and some time at the Barangka basketball court.

26 January 2013

After giving some of our general thoughts about Bali, now we’ll actually give a run down of our trip:

We had a short flight from Yogyakarta to Denpasar and were picked up at the airport by a driver sent by the place we were staying. Since we came in around 8:00pm the traffic wasn’t very bad so we were able to make it to Ubud in less than an hour.

We stayed at Lodtundah Sari, a beautiful little hotel about a 20-minute walk from the southern edge of Ubud. The staff was very helpful and friendly and, since we were surrounded by rice fields, we really enjoyed the peace and quiet. Each little room was its own structure that was surrounded by little ponds and fountains. At night the frogs could be quite loud (here, here, and some other animal that we couldn’t identify here) but it was a nice change from the sounds of the city.

On our first day we walked into town. We passed dozens of small temples along the road. The main part of Ubud is now basically a town full of boutiques and restaurants catering to tourists. We found an amazing bakery, though, that had the best bread we’ve tasted since moving to the Philippines. Since we’re both kind of bread snobs we’ve really missed hearty, crusty, bread. We’re not entirely proud to say that we ate there several times. After a day spent walking around Ubud sightseeing and planning our next two days, we went out in the evening to watch a kecak performance (I wrote about this in the last post).

The next morning, we were picked up at 7:30am for a bike tour of the area. There are lots of different companies doing day-long bike tours but we were recommended to try Bali on Bike by two of our friends who had recently been in Ubud for their honeymoon. Two other couples joined us on the tour. First we drove up towards Mt. Batur, stopping off at a coffee plantation. There were lots of other things growing there but they were primarily interested in showing us their famous Civet-poop coffee. We sampled several types of coffee before continuing on up towards a scenic view of Mt. Batur. By about 10:00 or 10:30 they took out the bikes and we began our trip. Since we had been driving up the whole morning we only had to coast downhill the entire day, very little actual pedaling.

We spent the next several hours biking/coasting along small roads that went alongside small villages and rice paddies (We also saw the plant that closes up when you touch it growing in the wild). It rained quite hard for the first hour or so of our trip so they gave us rain gear that worked very well. We ended the tour by stopping at the bike tour owner’s house, where his wife made us a delicious meal. All in all, it was fun day.

For our last day in Ubud, we found someone to take us to the silver-working town and the famous woodworking area to see some of the things people made there. The silver places we went were actually a bit more expensive than stores we’d seen in Ubud but the wood-pieces were much more intricate and varied. We ended up getting one picture frame with a Barong mask on the top.

Later that day, we went back into Ubud to try a walk on some of the smaller, outer roads. We passed by the Ubud Palace and the famous water temple near it (we watched a Balinese dance lesson at the palace). We walked down a nice little road that seemed miles away from Ubud’s main drag, even if it was only one block off. Since we ended our walk by the start of the Monkey Forest, we decided to visit for a little bit. The forest was right over/part of a beautiful river gorge so we had fun exploring. The monkeys were fun to watch, too (here and here).

We flew out of Denpasar at 1:00am so we tried to rest for a while at the hotel before catching a car down to the airport. We were lucky that the flight from Denpasar to Manila was practically empty so we each were able to snag three empty seats to ourselves and stretch out. When we arrived in Manila at 5:00am we had our normally frustrations haggling with cab drivers at the airport to take us out to Marikina but we were really happy to be back again.