Back in Marikina

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.