AS an eternal passenger, only one thing interests me about highways and roads.
It often falls on me to look for signs and landmarks to assist the person behind the wheel.
Unlike this person, though, whose priority is to get to some place at a certain time, I’m happy enough to be distracted by roadside views, “being here” taking precedence over “getting there”.
In this country, a chief roadside attraction are the signs that do more than advertise business names; they show the Filipino flair for creativity with English, as well as humor and double entendre.
Along Gen. Maxilom St. in Cebu is a row of grill joints that always look tawdry and decrepit in daylight. Its chief attraction for me is a signboard that shows a danciferous sow gyrating below the words, “Belly Idol”.
For a people who love to imitate what’s imported, trendy or successful, we hold the adjective, “original,” in so high esteem, we usually precede its usage with the article, “the,” creating a kind of informal title to confer the stamp or seal of excellence, if not originality.
Witness, for instance, the uncontrolled proliferation of these unabashedly contradictory roadside claims: “The Original Siomai sa…,” “The Original Chicharon of …,” etc.
I used to be jaded about these assertions of excellence by way of first privilege. I decided that my selection of the entrepreneur to patronize would be determined not by whether one’s ancestor was the first in the town to discover the sinful secrets of a pockmarked pod of cacao, but rather by the choice in the business name to display a properly spelled “The Original,” instead of the modernized awfulness of “D’Original”.
However, a trip to Los Baños reconfigured my perceptions.
If you ever find yourself driving along the national highway in Barangay Anos at Los Baños, Laguna, do persevere past the glut of roadside bakeries blandishing monotonous signs of “The Original Buko Pie” to ferret out a similar-looking stand with a similar-sounding claim.
Despite the predictable branding and packaging, Orient, The ORIGINAL Buko Pie Bakeshop, stands out in the highway stretch because of the parked vehicles and people waiting for the bakery to pop open the ovens.
I cannot vouch for the espasol, uraro and banana bread—intriguing-sounding but unfortunately, untasted—but just smelling the goodness wafted from a steaming buko pie explains why people would wait for 20 or even 30 minutes. (After the first mouthful of the fat strips of naturally sweet-tasting buko, not candied, jellied or frozen, you might even take another 2-hour trip from Manila to expressly catch the next batch.)
While cities rely on sky-high billboards and outdoor movie screens to entice traffic, roadside displays of local produce or crafts serve as the best one-stop museums/craftshop/info centers of towns and cities outside urban centers.
The stretch of the national highway leading away from the center of Los Baños to Anos is lined with stalls selling all kinds and colors of pool toys, floats and other inflatables, as well as swimming apparel. Having a fog-wreathed Mt. Makiling tower above these seaside sights stumped me until it was explained that the favorite local recreation is provided by hot and cold springs, already popular in Anos since the Spanish era.
While other fog-draped celebrities—Taal Lake and Volcano—dominate the first-time visitor’s experience of Tagaytay, its roadside vendors, selling wooden sculpture and furniture, bananas, pineapple, jackfruit and other farm produce, were more than eye-catching.
The bananas seemed to be of one type. Small and narrow, each fruit resembled curled children’s fingers. Only when I was back in Manila did I find out the name of the bananas: señorita, a variety that’s incomparably sweet and filling.
When I do taste señorita these days, it comes from my grandmother’s farm. I’ve been told that few farmers cultivate this because it’s less commercial than the fat and hefty-priced cardaba, lakatan, latundan, bangan and bulongan.
Though I missed tasting the señoritas of Tagaytay, it feels good to know, from a roadside glimpse, that the rare and passing still thrive somewhere somehow.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayette.tabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 5, 2011 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Lost, still
Museum- and night-prowling are spectator sports I discovered in Manila.
As a small-town person with small-pond predilections, I find the capital overwhelming.
To understand a new place, I usually walk around to wait which pinches first: the calluses of my feet or the preconceived notions in my mind.
But this sprawling, brawling place demands a marshalling of resources. When finding my way out of the subdivision takes a good part of an hour, I resolve to break down this city into simpler units.
What can induce a Filipino to stroll in this country?
Malls and food.
Someone with pitifully poor resources—no sense of direction, Filipino so thick sieving the natural Cebuano results in an odd patois that sounds more like English than the even more alien Filipino—is imagined to be of less danger to herself when deposited at any of the city’s myriad malls.
Planning a reunion with old friends? Malls are the landmarks and arteries of convergence that the plazas were of old.
Except that in Manila, many malls are not merely “tambayan (hang-out)” but mini-cities.
I realized this one afternoon when I entered one mall as a storm was gaining strength, emerging hours later in an adjoining mall whose expensively aged promenade was spotless and dry as a parched desert of glass and chrome.
It is not only not strange to find a rainforest juxtaposed with an English countryside and a Mediterranean courtyard, all courtesy of a sleight of urban planning. Some malls make me wonder if selling is just about moving goods and services.
Once, sitting on a bench I first mistook as sculpture, I contemplated a whole wall of glass, the storefront of a brand I cannot pronounce. The centerpiece of this expensive display of space, glass and silence were three stumps.
The middle one was pale and blotched, with the sheen and solidity of stone though it was indubitably of wood. A small sticker was easy to read because the upside-down figures contained just one primary number and the rest were zeros before a decimal point.
Was this obscenely priced trunk my first sight of ironwood, rare remnant of a native forest species ship- and church-building Spaniards forced Filipinos to fell into extinction?
More than an emporium, a mall can be a museum, affording one a glimpse of the rarefied and extravagant or the plainly unimaginable. To find something one thought no longer existed, and to discover it has a price, is instructive.
While Manila’s malls seemingly leave nothing uncommodified, their evening streets sent me off on a quest for the elusive “BBQ”.
Malls, with their dining cornucopia, are depots for refueling before one jumps into and risks the undercurrents of Manila traffic. Ironically, all that variety palls.
One evening, sleepless and nauseated from hicupping the remnants of another arcade repast, we kept our eyes peeled for the smoke-wreathed figure of the streetside barbecue vendor, a Cebuano institution, wizards in not just converting cheap cuts or throwaways like intestines, heads and feet into pocket-friendly exotica but also in juggling the myriad tasks of informal enterprise: skewering one’s dinner, roasting, pouring “sawsawan,” slicing open “puso” with half a blade, rinsing dishes, receiving payment, returning change, catching out freeloaders, and—the truly best—preventing nightcrawlers from falling into your food.
Seen: liempo, lechon manok, pork lechon packed in clear containers, neat squares of congealing skin arranged on top in an odd mosaic, an abbreviated version of the whole pigs sprawled near great chopping boards back home.
Not seen: BBQ baboy, BBQ manok, BBQ isda, BBQ nokos, BBQ saging.
The food we grew up with may send us off to a too early meeting with our Maker. But for as long as we strive and barter skies, food provides the crawlspace for shutting one’s eyes and pretending we’re back in our beds.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu's May 29, 2011 issue of the "Matamata" Sunday column
As a small-town person with small-pond predilections, I find the capital overwhelming.
To understand a new place, I usually walk around to wait which pinches first: the calluses of my feet or the preconceived notions in my mind.
But this sprawling, brawling place demands a marshalling of resources. When finding my way out of the subdivision takes a good part of an hour, I resolve to break down this city into simpler units.
What can induce a Filipino to stroll in this country?
Malls and food.
Someone with pitifully poor resources—no sense of direction, Filipino so thick sieving the natural Cebuano results in an odd patois that sounds more like English than the even more alien Filipino—is imagined to be of less danger to herself when deposited at any of the city’s myriad malls.
Planning a reunion with old friends? Malls are the landmarks and arteries of convergence that the plazas were of old.
Except that in Manila, many malls are not merely “tambayan (hang-out)” but mini-cities.
I realized this one afternoon when I entered one mall as a storm was gaining strength, emerging hours later in an adjoining mall whose expensively aged promenade was spotless and dry as a parched desert of glass and chrome.
It is not only not strange to find a rainforest juxtaposed with an English countryside and a Mediterranean courtyard, all courtesy of a sleight of urban planning. Some malls make me wonder if selling is just about moving goods and services.
Once, sitting on a bench I first mistook as sculpture, I contemplated a whole wall of glass, the storefront of a brand I cannot pronounce. The centerpiece of this expensive display of space, glass and silence were three stumps.
The middle one was pale and blotched, with the sheen and solidity of stone though it was indubitably of wood. A small sticker was easy to read because the upside-down figures contained just one primary number and the rest were zeros before a decimal point.
Was this obscenely priced trunk my first sight of ironwood, rare remnant of a native forest species ship- and church-building Spaniards forced Filipinos to fell into extinction?
More than an emporium, a mall can be a museum, affording one a glimpse of the rarefied and extravagant or the plainly unimaginable. To find something one thought no longer existed, and to discover it has a price, is instructive.
While Manila’s malls seemingly leave nothing uncommodified, their evening streets sent me off on a quest for the elusive “BBQ”.
Malls, with their dining cornucopia, are depots for refueling before one jumps into and risks the undercurrents of Manila traffic. Ironically, all that variety palls.
One evening, sleepless and nauseated from hicupping the remnants of another arcade repast, we kept our eyes peeled for the smoke-wreathed figure of the streetside barbecue vendor, a Cebuano institution, wizards in not just converting cheap cuts or throwaways like intestines, heads and feet into pocket-friendly exotica but also in juggling the myriad tasks of informal enterprise: skewering one’s dinner, roasting, pouring “sawsawan,” slicing open “puso” with half a blade, rinsing dishes, receiving payment, returning change, catching out freeloaders, and—the truly best—preventing nightcrawlers from falling into your food.
Seen: liempo, lechon manok, pork lechon packed in clear containers, neat squares of congealing skin arranged on top in an odd mosaic, an abbreviated version of the whole pigs sprawled near great chopping boards back home.
Not seen: BBQ baboy, BBQ manok, BBQ isda, BBQ nokos, BBQ saging.
The food we grew up with may send us off to a too early meeting with our Maker. But for as long as we strive and barter skies, food provides the crawlspace for shutting one’s eyes and pretending we’re back in our beds.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu's May 29, 2011 issue of the "Matamata" Sunday column
Moving still
I WATCH bags during airport waits. Then I check their owners’ faces to see if they match the way they’ve packed to go.
Why not look at the persons first? It’s a game I play to calm myself. I’m used to waiting—all the queues I’ve joined, out of obeisance to bureaucracy and curiosity—but airports, with their technology and (in)security, unsettle me.
I have mixed feelings about travel. I can understand that not all flights can be consummated by opening a book and becoming a character in a world imagined, scene by scene.
But a lifetime of pulling up stakes has not simplified the complexity of deciding which of my possessions to take with me, which to leave behind, shed off, or return to.
How did the ancients travel? What did it take to make the leap from “leave” to “leave behind”?
The necessity and ease of travel make it now natural for us to pair off departures and arrivals, rattling off ETDs and ETAs with the nonchalant assumption of using the same points of reference. A terminal is a terminal and not a terminal, in the double meaning of modern travel jargon. A round-trip ticket as an axiom, not an option.
So why is there nothing lighthearted about packing up?
Perhaps it’s just me since, scene after scene in the airports I’ve waited at, the bags and their owners flow with more regularity and insouciance than one can expect from the luggage conveyor belt unrolling surprises after the standard interminable wait.
Packing has become such a science and a business, it comes no longer as a wonderment that the singular gastronomic, cultural and sensual experience conjured by a mere kilo or more of lechon made the Cebuano way can now be reduced to a small tidy white box held in a clear plastic bag dangling from a traveler’s wrist. Only a tiny red stamped image of a happy porker with jaunty heels inviting a nibble allows one to imagine the herb-impregnated, cholesterol-steeped indulgence sent across the miles to barely sate distant, pining appetites.
The minimal is king in this transient, transcendent world.
Even folks who don’t look as if they’re traveling on business prioritize in their carry-ons a laptop or gadget whose screen is of a size that’s totally disproportionate to its power to suck in all that is human, leaving behind a facsimile in flesh biding its time at a terminal that may not be one at all.
What people take out of their bags to endure waiting may not be as revealing as what they keep in, but it is all that is accessible to the mordant but not criminally curious. When dealing with inevitable irritants, such as delayed departures or unwelcome seatmates, one reaches inside that carry-on and escapes.
I thought minimal, synthetic and black defined these modern lifesavers until one evening, during three hours of waiting, I saw the unexpected make its appearance.
At first, I thought it was the herding instinct of a group traveling together or attending the same seminar in Cebu. But as one “buyot” or “bayong” after another rolled off the checking counters and were picked up by owners who drifted apart, I wondered whether the green movement would not just save the earth but also bring a resurgence of the artisan.
These native totes, made of leaves, fiber and vines, are picked, pounded, dried, woven and traded by those who travel not just from faraway places—Guihulngan, Antequerra, Baybay, Badian and others of musical-sounding provenance—but transmit the instincts and memories of those for whom the making was integral for possessing and using.
Cleaving the sea of travelers pigeonholed in their digital solitudes, the Caucasian lady carried a folded woven sleeping mat. In one of our checked-in bags, I brought the still stiff and resistant undyed mat of “tikog” reeds a friend in Alegria wove and sent to me.
Heading for the perpetually lit, unsleeping highrises that skyscape a city for whom I hold little love, I thought it best to bring this talisman of a world that drew sustenance from the earth and would, in time, return to its roots.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in the May 22, 2011 issue of Sun.Star Cebu's "Matamata" Sunday column
Why not look at the persons first? It’s a game I play to calm myself. I’m used to waiting—all the queues I’ve joined, out of obeisance to bureaucracy and curiosity—but airports, with their technology and (in)security, unsettle me.
I have mixed feelings about travel. I can understand that not all flights can be consummated by opening a book and becoming a character in a world imagined, scene by scene.
But a lifetime of pulling up stakes has not simplified the complexity of deciding which of my possessions to take with me, which to leave behind, shed off, or return to.
How did the ancients travel? What did it take to make the leap from “leave” to “leave behind”?
The necessity and ease of travel make it now natural for us to pair off departures and arrivals, rattling off ETDs and ETAs with the nonchalant assumption of using the same points of reference. A terminal is a terminal and not a terminal, in the double meaning of modern travel jargon. A round-trip ticket as an axiom, not an option.
So why is there nothing lighthearted about packing up?
Perhaps it’s just me since, scene after scene in the airports I’ve waited at, the bags and their owners flow with more regularity and insouciance than one can expect from the luggage conveyor belt unrolling surprises after the standard interminable wait.
Packing has become such a science and a business, it comes no longer as a wonderment that the singular gastronomic, cultural and sensual experience conjured by a mere kilo or more of lechon made the Cebuano way can now be reduced to a small tidy white box held in a clear plastic bag dangling from a traveler’s wrist. Only a tiny red stamped image of a happy porker with jaunty heels inviting a nibble allows one to imagine the herb-impregnated, cholesterol-steeped indulgence sent across the miles to barely sate distant, pining appetites.
The minimal is king in this transient, transcendent world.
Even folks who don’t look as if they’re traveling on business prioritize in their carry-ons a laptop or gadget whose screen is of a size that’s totally disproportionate to its power to suck in all that is human, leaving behind a facsimile in flesh biding its time at a terminal that may not be one at all.
What people take out of their bags to endure waiting may not be as revealing as what they keep in, but it is all that is accessible to the mordant but not criminally curious. When dealing with inevitable irritants, such as delayed departures or unwelcome seatmates, one reaches inside that carry-on and escapes.
I thought minimal, synthetic and black defined these modern lifesavers until one evening, during three hours of waiting, I saw the unexpected make its appearance.
At first, I thought it was the herding instinct of a group traveling together or attending the same seminar in Cebu. But as one “buyot” or “bayong” after another rolled off the checking counters and were picked up by owners who drifted apart, I wondered whether the green movement would not just save the earth but also bring a resurgence of the artisan.
These native totes, made of leaves, fiber and vines, are picked, pounded, dried, woven and traded by those who travel not just from faraway places—Guihulngan, Antequerra, Baybay, Badian and others of musical-sounding provenance—but transmit the instincts and memories of those for whom the making was integral for possessing and using.
Cleaving the sea of travelers pigeonholed in their digital solitudes, the Caucasian lady carried a folded woven sleeping mat. In one of our checked-in bags, I brought the still stiff and resistant undyed mat of “tikog” reeds a friend in Alegria wove and sent to me.
Heading for the perpetually lit, unsleeping highrises that skyscape a city for whom I hold little love, I thought it best to bring this talisman of a world that drew sustenance from the earth and would, in time, return to its roots.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in the May 22, 2011 issue of Sun.Star Cebu's "Matamata" Sunday column
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