The Philippines: More Food!

I seem to be pathologically unable to travel without penning long, pointless blog posts about food. If only there were some way to transmit tastes and smells over the internet, these posts might be marginally interesting to our readers, instead of just rambling and self-indulgent.

Anyway! Here goes.

The produce in the Philippines is absolutely amazing. Not only are the islands home to a significant percentage of the mangoes, pineapples, and bananas eaten around the world, they're also home to a host of other fruits, including varieties of the above, that are hard to find elsewhere.

One of our best meals of the trip was really just a simple showcase of fresh Filipino ingredients. It was in Tagaytay, outside of Manila, at a place called Sonia's (also known for its toilets, apparently).

If you squint enough to see through the dim lighting, you can see chunks of fresh pineapple, mango, and papaya, plus some yellowish slivers of jackfruit, which has a texture sort of like thick artichoke but tastes something like a mix of Asian pear, mango, and banana. And that was just for our salad! Later, we had bread and pasta with various sauces, including sun-dried tomato, pesto made with fresh basil, and green peppercorns in olive oil. Dessert was a plate of banana spring rolls with a side of honeyed sweet potato, capped off with tea made from sprig of tarragon.

Honestly, one of the best meals I can remember. The simple trick? Pretty much everything on the table was grown within walking distance of the restaurant. More easily done in the middle of a tropical paradise, of course.

Sonia's was a great showcase for the natural abundance of the Philippines, but how about actual Filipino cuisine? Well, our lovely host, Beia, and her family treated us to a full Filipino breakfast one morning. Quite a feast:

Fresh fruit featured prominently (that's papaya and mango), with generous helpings of mushroom omelette, corned beef hash, and a local roll called "pandesal." We washed it down with mugs of drinking chocolate.

Nana learned the stabby method for eating the middle slice of a mango . . .

. . . and I discovered the joys of coco jam, which is basically like peanut butter, but made with coconut instead.

Beia's family also hosted us for a family potluck to celebrate the various auspicious occasions we happened to crash.

Here, you can really see the odd fusions of American and Spanish cuisines with the Filipino palate. We have Filipino spaghetti, a stew of red peppers and chicken bits, a kind of spiced meatloaf, and garlic sausages with . . . marshmallows. Tasty, if somewhat puzzling!

Finally, a dash of traditional Filipino cuisine, sampled at a well-known eatery near our friend's place of work.

The centerpiece was a big bowl of simple beef soup (upper left) with a plate of veggies and seafood in Filipino "curry," which is actually a peanut sauce. We also had a side of crispy fried pork rinds in blood sauce. Totally awesome, but too rich for more than a couple bites!

Overall, Nana and I really liked the food we ate in the Philippines. In many parts of Asia, to get a lot of flavor, you have to put up with a lot of spiciness. Not so in the Philippines!

Final verdict? If we lived in the Philippines, we would get HUGE.

*Special thanks to our hosts, Beia and Romel, who found us some awesome stuff to eat!

My First Male Prom Date

I've been to prom before - three proms, actually. I went to my junior and senior proms, and then went back up to the city where I lived before in Michigan as a senior and did their senior prom, too. In all three of these situations I went with a date, but unfortunately for my high school social life, they were just female friends who paired up with me so we could get the ticket discount. So this was my first prom in which I had a date. Isn't he cute?


The theme of the FIS prom was "Celestial," hence the moon and stars overhead here:

The tables were decorated with star ornaments and cookie cutters. There were cards scattered with pictures of Venus, the Solar System, etc. Justin and I invented a game like War in which you played these cards and won based on whose card had the greatest probability of life - as in, Mars defeats Mercury. If you had a tie (say, Space and Earth, or the Astronaut and E.T.,both at 100) you kept playing until somebody won. If you play Saturn or Jupiter, you get to count the moons. I still think Justin shortchanged Venus. He is so carbon-normative. Give sulfur-based life forms a chance!

Edited to add: Coworker Katherine took this picture of our card game, just in case you thought we couldn't possibly REALLY be nerdy enough to play it. If there is one thing you can learn from this blog, it is never to bet against how nerdy Justin and I can be.

We also had glowsticks. I made a bracelet, then a hat, then a belt, then a belt with a dangly bit, and then a bandolier. Think of me as a four-year-old with marginally better motor skills.

Coworkers Sarah and Tim helped with photography, and these are their pictures above. Their camera suffered a tragic hairline fracture on their trip to Vietnam when the lens got sideswiped by a motorcycle (which, on the other hand, is probably one of the better cocktail party stories about camera problems. Much better than ours, anyway, which involved the zoom lens breaking because Justin kept accidentally turning the camera on while it was in his pocket.) This is me demonstrating genuine, commiseratory sorrow at their loss. Also being the Monopoly Man.

Like two of the U.S. proms I went to, there was a dinner first. Unlike the proms I went to, there was very little dancing and it was over at 10. Think of it more as a senior banquet with a bit of dancing at the end. We had slide shows of senior photos, a great video of friends and former teachers around the world, and musical performances by some juniors. We all got emotional, and the tenth graders took advantage of this to eat all the dessert.

The evening was just fantastic, thanks to the yeoman's work of coworker Robert, the junior class advisor, who has been fundraising and organizing for months. I think the only bad part of prom for all of us was that this means Robert won't be forced to cook giant pots of chili to sell at lunch anymore. Unless he needs spare cash. I'm not above a little burglary to try to make this happen.

Philippines: Jollibee! and Other Fast Food

Filipino food is really good. I say this even though Nana and I spent a shameful amount of time in the Philippines eating fast food. That's because the Philippines boasts some really tasty fast-food options--and even a few welcome wrinkles at McDonalds!

Jollibee

Jollibee is the undisputed champion of Filipino fast food chains. Not only does Jollibee outnumber McDonalds in the Philippines, but Jollibee also owns Chow King, the second most ubiquitous Filipino fast food joint, and a 70% stake in Mang Inasal (see below). As a result, I'd guess that roughly half of our meals in the Philippines came from Jollibee in one way or another.

We hit Jollibee up at two different times of day. First, a Filipino breakfast, fast-food style: garlic rice, scrambled eggs, corned beef hash, and a pandesal (a local roll) with sausage.

We also stopped by Jollibee for a late dinner, where in addition to the standard Yum Burger, we sampled Jollibee spaghetti and some fried chicken.

The spaghetti was . . . odd. Not unpleasant, but the sauce was sweet, with a very faint hint of chili. It's almost like they accidentally dropped a packet of spring roll sauce in the mix.

Jollibee also does desserts, a la McDonalds apple pie--but in this case, it's mango and peach instead of apple inside.

McDonald's, by the way, makes its own variation on the pandesal--a "hamdesal" with ham, egg, and (yes) honey mayo.

Mang Inasal

Mang Inasal ("Mr. Barbecue," if anyone bothered to translate) is best known in the Philippines for offering unlimited rice with every meal.

But it's best known in our little family for selling tasty, super-cheap barbecue.

That spread--with pork skewers, chicken, rice (one wrapped, one unwrapped), and a couple calamansi (a kind of Filipino lime)--cost all of $3.

Further evidence that, if I lived in the Philippines, I might weigh 400 pounds.

More Philippines Phun: Sun Cruises Corregidor Tour

In just a few days and with our resolution not to bust ourselves touring too hard, Justin and I barely scratched the surface of the Philippines's 7,107 islands. We did get to see the historic island of Corregidor, which played an important role in World War II, via Sun Cruises, and in company with our awesome friends Beia and Romel.


Also, lunch.
Before World War II, Corregidor was a US base. I found a wonderful web site by a woman born on Corregidor to service parents with details of their life there, such as the closet with the light on all the time to prevent mold from growing in the clothes. (Lest you be puzzled by the visible dryness in our pictures, I'll point out that May, our visit, is the hottest and driest month on Corregidor. We have impeccable timing.) Apparently you couldn't bring furniture from the U.S. because the glue couldn't hold up to the heat. causing the furniture to fall apart. I finally understand know why the tied rattan furniture is such a hallmark of colonial design. Despite such irritations, her family loved Corregidor enough to re-up for an extra year there. Well, it can certainly be stunning:

And also, you had lots of servants for very little money- she says three for her family of three (a houseboy, laundress, and nursemaid).

The barracks were constructed out of concrete, apparently because the termites got anything else, and even for concrete they had to raise it off the ground. The remains of pre-war barracks can be seen on Corregidor today. The island is shaped like a tadpole, they like to tell you, which is certainly more polite than the word I thought of. In the "head" of the island, you have the areas of Bottomside, Middleside, and Topside, so named because the island is a big old hill. Bottomside, the lowest altitude is where we took the picture earlier, and also where we had our lunch. Housing starts on Middleside with the remains of Middleside Barracks.

Things get wild on Topside, where you have the ruins of Mile-Long Barracks, supposedly the longest single barracks building made by the U.S. It's not actually a mile long (closer to 1/3 of a mile) but "One Third Of A Mile-Long Barracks" sounds lame.


The missing windows here were once wood and capiz shell, a la the highly-rated toilets of Sonya's. The ruins of the movie theater are there as well. We also went up the reconstruction of the Spanish Lighthouse, for some stunning views.


You are probably picking up on some key words for visitors to the Philippines: "remains," "ruins," and "reconstructions." Just as it did with Manila, World War II did a number on Corregidor.

Indulge the history teacher for a moment here. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese navy bombed Pearl Harbor (you've probably heard of this; it's pretty infamous). War came to the Philippines on December 8, but when you factor in the international date line, it was the same day as Hawaii, just ten hours later. General Douglas MacArthur, it is recorded, received notification of the Hawaii attack within an hour and a half. This left him nine hours of preparation in which he did... precisely nothing.

You may have already picked up on Justin and my distaste for Dugout Doug. Every history geek worth his or her salt has pet villains, and he's one of ours. Partly, this is shaped by my grandfather, who never forgave him for his actions on Corregidor (more on this later). It's also shaped by my dislike of men who attempt to overthrow the U.S. government by suborning the military. Philippine opinions on MacArthur seem more widespread. On the other hand, there was the Carlos Celdran tour, in which he shared the "Dugout Doug" nickname (earned, so it's said, from his habit of fleeing for cover when bombs started falling, leaving his men behind) and blamed MacArthur's egofor the destruction of Manila (again, more later, unless I forget). On the other hand, according to our Corregidor guide, MacArthur's name was called for years at roll call for the Philippine Army, with a sergeant stepping forward to give the response, "Present in spirit."

So MacArthur failed to get the Philippine defense off the ground, literally, culminating in his air force being destroyed on the tarmac. The American-Filipino combined army fought at length on the Bataan Peninsula but gradually retreated south until forced to surrender due to lack of supplies. The march back up the peninsula is more commonly known as the Bataan Death March, in which thousands of prisoners (the majority Filipino) died of malnutrition, exhaustion, dehydration, or execution. The purpose of the Death March was to clear Bataan for the invasion of the intransigent little island of Corregidor.

Make a backwards "C" with your right hand, and your index finger is Bataan. The fleshy part between your finger and thumb is Manila. The space in the C is Manila Bay, and Corregidor is an imaginary dot between your thumb and index finger, guarding the entrance to the bay.

MacArthur and his staff had withdrawn to Corregidor, along with the men who would be inaugurated as President and Vice-President of the Philippines. They hunkered down in Malinta Tunnel, now home to a "light and audio" show for an additionall fee which we gave a pass.

MacArthur evacuated from Corregidor to Australia in February, 1942, both giving his famous "I Shall Return" speech and leaving his second in command, General Wainwright, to surrender to the Japanese in May. My grandfather never forgave him for this. (It should be said that MacArthur was under orders from Roosevelt to evacuate. It should also be said that my grandfather probably didn't think much of Roosevelt either.) This ardent desire to fulfill his pledge, coupled with frustration at being an Army general in the Navy's theater of war, led MacArthur to insist on opening a front in the Philippines even though the island-hopping strategy (bypass non-essential islands en route to Japan itself) dictated leaving them alone. In the Battle of Manila alone, nearly 100,000 Filipino civilians died, and the city was left in ruins. You connect the dots.

Here's a statue of him at the dock.

The potential for misinterpetation in this hand gesture amuses me.

I have just know realized that this is substantially longer than the "moment" I asked for. Thank you for bearing with me, and please understand I can't help myself.

We visited some of the defense sites of the island, such as Battery Hearn


and Battery Way, named, to my surprise, for a guy named Way, instead of as in "Battery Path." It is the site of the stand of an army mortar crew let by Major William Massello. Our surnames are similar enough that I adopted him for the duration of reading his memorial plaque. Distinguished Service Cross for keeping the battery operating for eleven straight hours while under continuous fire, firing the gun himself to minimize the exposure of his crews to counterfire, saved his own right arm by holding down his artery with his left thumb after shrapnel tore through it, reportedly tearing the telephone out of the wall so he couldn't receive an order to surrender. Oh, and then it was off to three years as a POW, where he insisted on offloading sick comrades from prison ships while his right arm was still paralyzed. No wonder Death waited until this guy was 89 to come after him.

The monument to World War II on Corregidor is at the top of Topside, along with a little shoestring-budget museum of Corregidor's history as a US base.

I have three main complaints on the day with Sun Cruises. The first was that we took way too long to get started after lunch, which plays into the second - not enough time at each stop. I really had to dash through this museum. The third complaint, which I know is going to make me sound like a bit of a jerk, was that the guide's accent was so thick that I barely had any idea what he was saying.

On the way home we were treated to the famed Manila Bay sunset.

I forgot to mention that these ferry rides are over an hour long. That's probably why Justin looks so happy. I have to get him off of boats with a crowbar.

According to the tourism video showed by China Airlines at the end of our flight, there is a Filipino saying that while watching the sun set off of the first Philippine island, the gods liked the sight so much they created 7,106 additional islands. So I will leave you with this photograph of sunset over Bataan, and point out that if I were in charge, I'm not sure I'd stop at 7,107.

Mark Lee on Nuclear Disinformation in Japan

Just before Golden Week, we had a visit from college friend Mark Lee (previous post).

Mark has a post up on his blog, Goes to Twelve, about the international misunderstanding of the current situation in Japan. What he says is spot-on: large parts of the country have been completely unaffected by the disaster, and its a shame that foreign tourists have been staying away from Japan because of overblown radiation fears.

Basically, if you're planning a trip for anywhere west of Tokyo or north of northern Honshu, you shouldn't let the March disasters or the lingering nuclear situation in Fukushima affect your travel plans at all. Even Tokyo's safe, though inconvenienced by power shortages that could make the summer months uncomfortably hot.

Manila: Intramuros Tour with Carlos Celdran

Before our trip, I didn't know much at all about the Philippines. I still don't--it's an incredibly complex country, from its geography and its history right up through its linguistics--but thanks to Carlos Celdran, I know more than I used to.

Carlos Celdran is something of a local celebrity in Manila, and thanks to Lonely Planet, he's gained some recognition among visitors from overseas, too. He's a performer by training, but in the Philippines, the line between performer and politician is always a bit blurred: Celdran is also an activist for reproductive health and the prevention of HIV/AIDS, and as such an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church in the Philippines.

Each of Celdran's tours is essentially a play: Wikipedia describes Celdran aptly, not as a tour guide, but as "the producer, director, and actor in a one-man, multi-venue costumed performance, leading patrons through the city as he alternately acts and narrates along the way." The result is a unforgettable, entertaining, and (yes) opinionated take on the long history of Manila and its role in the world. Throughout it all, Celdran demonstrates both his skill as a performer and his deep affections for the city, warts and all.

The tour we took, called "If these Walls Could Talk," was a walking tour of Intramuros (literally "inside the walls"), the historic heart of Manila before World War II.

Now, I'm a born pedant, so it's hard for me to resist the temptation to re-tell Celdran's story. But seeing as I can't hope to do justice to his version, I'll stick to some of the big, new ideas I encountered on the tour. Some of these ideas, I know, are inflected with Celdran's own political opinions, which frankly I kind of appreciate--something obviously opinionated makes you want to learn more, while something subtly opinionated can trick you into thinking it's even-handed.

Anyway, the big lessons I learned:

1. The Philippines weren't really a Spanish colony.

Yeah, yeah--the Spanish "discovered" it, and Ferdinand Magellan was killed there. (Seriously, just outside of Manila.)

But the Spaniards didn't really want the Philippines. Too far, not rich in the right resources (gold, silver). In the end, the Spanish just lumped it in as a far-flung province of Mexico and forgot about it. So when the Church came asking about all those unconverted souls over there at the other end of the ocean, the king basically handed the place over to the missionaries, who ruled the country as a quasi-theocracy.

The Pope's churches dominate the King's forts.

This arrangement an interesting demographic effect on the Philippines: because the Spanish sent no women, and the priests they sent were (in theory) celibate, there are actually very few people in the Philippines of Spanish descent.

Incidentally, Celdran is one of them: he can trace one part of his family back to a naughty 19th-century priest.

2. The American Period was . . . complicated.

I knew that the Philippines had been an American colony from the Spanish-American War (aka, "Remember the Maine," aka "the one where we got Puerto Rico," aka "the one Teddy Roosevelt fought in") until World War II (aka "Casablanca," "Band of Brothers," and the History Channel). I also knew that the US fought its first Vietnam in the Philippines against an uprising of locals fighting for independence.

What I didn't know was how mixed the American legacy in the Philippines was. The Americans brought a lot of good things to the Philippines: public education and mass literacy, modern infrastructure (including Philippine Airlines, Asia's first airline), secularism in government, and a semblance of democracy. The Americans also built a clear timetable for independence, and worked towards preparing the Philippines for self-government and democracy. There doesn't seem to be any question that the Philippines were better off under the Americans than they had been under the Spanish.

At the same time, the Americans also brought war. The American military presence made Manila a target for the Japanese, and American efforts to retake the city in the face of fierce Japanese occupation left Manila almost completely destroyed after the war. More completely destroyed, in fact, than any allied city but Warsaw.

Most signs like this in Intramuros have a line reading "Destroyed during the Battle of Manila in 1945."

This segment was by far the most powerful part of Celdran's tour. Under an old narra tree next to the ruins of a bombed-out US barracks, Celdran recounted the story of Manila's destruction. MacArthur, determined to return to the site of his defeat at the start of the war, bombed the ever-living heck out of Manila in an effort to reduce the Japanese defenses. At the same time, as the outlook for Japan was growing grim, the Japanese army began to systematically exterminate the Filipino citizens of Manila. He punctuated the story with an overhead shot of an American bomb falling on an already-destroyed Intramuros. Celdran's telling is a tragedy: a city and a people caught between two greater powers.


Overall, about a million Filipinos died in the war, with about 100,000 killed by the Japanese in the Manila Massacre. And while Manila has boomed since the war, sprouting a dozen bustling satellite cities, old Intramuros has never recovered, and the scars of the war are still visible around the town.

A memorial marking a mass grave for victims of the Manila Massacre.

Anyway, if you go to Manila, Celdran's Intramuros tour is an absolute must. I'd even say that, if you only do one thing in Manila, take Celdran's Intramuros tour. It's the best introduction there is to the city's rich and tragic history: it will leave you fascinated and wanting to learn more.


The tour also has something for the kids: a horse-drawn carriage ride . . .

. . . and two snacks!

That's halo-halo, or "mix-mix," the Philippine national dessert.

An Ode to the Manila Airport Hotel

The Manila Airport Hotel is a lot like Manila itself: shabby, inexplicable, but somehow endearing. On my last night in the Philippines, as I lay awake waiting for MacArthur's next Return, I composed an ode to the Manila Airport Hotel. It goes something like this:

Oh, Manila Airport Hotel! Though the Fates
To us mere hours did allow, forever will my breast
Bear the bruises from your venerable boxsprings.
Even now, though a thousand miles do distance me
From your Spartan embrace,
Can I smell the sweet damp emanating from your carpets.
Wherever on this Earth I roam, I can promise this:
I will carry with me, imprinted on the eye of my mind,
The supernatural glow of your parking lot
Through the bottommost inches of the window--
Left uncovered, in your infinite wisdom,
By the yellowed curtains, once-white.
How could I, mere mortal, ever hope to sleep,
In the presence of such luxury
As a twelve-inch television
And a shower giving water both hot, and--yes!--cold?
Lo! There is nothing left for this poor wanderer
But to steel himself against the day
When he can hear the sweet song of disdainful silence
Ringing out from a reception desk,
And secret himself away in peaceful solitude
Above the teeming midnight KFC.