Tuesday, November 28, 2023

9:14 PM | Back Home

Got back to the hotel very late last night after the Palancas, and didn't bother getting any sleep because I had an early flight. Which meant that as soon as I got back home to Dumaguete, I went straight to bed to grab sleep till late afternoon, waking only to do my 4 PM class. Then I grabbed a foot massage because my feet were aching from the Manila trip, then I attended a birthday dinner for Renz's Aunt Mitzie. And now it's 9 PM. There's a whole mountain of to-do's to tackle! I'm on it.

Labels: life, travel

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Monday, October 23, 2023

9:00 AM | Taking Not Throwing My Shot

I needed this theatre break, away from all things Dumaguete for the weekend, with a thousand thanks to my high school friends Eugene Kho and Niña Christine Miraflor-Kho [and Lance!] who made this happen. I love Hamilton, but I was never a die hard fan of the material unlike most of my friends, until now. Found myself blown away by the magnificence of Act II, and teared up many times at various points of the concluding scenes. The duel, Burr's "I'm the villain of your story now" confession, the rousing legacy final number. The play's really a different thing when you see it live on stage.

Labels: life, theatre, travel

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Sunday, April 02, 2023

9:00 AM | The Ultimate Holy Week O.B.T. Around Negros Island

The term “O.B.T.”—for “one big tuyok”—was probably first used by Dumaguete resident Raffy Teves in 1982. It caught on, and decades later, we’re still using this term for the now “traditional” habit of going around Dumaguete in a car or motorcycle for several cycles before heading home. It started when quiet Dumaguete, once a city of 𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑠 or horse-drawn carriages, started having a considerable number of cars on its narrow roads. According to Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio, “There was nothing to do, so we would be hanging out at our homes, on rotation each week, for tapok. Then, if we ran out of things to do, Raffy would say, ‘O.B.T. ‘ta!’ and we’d all get on our rides and do a big tuyok of Dumaguete, which included all the cemeteries in town!”

Renz and do this, too, all the time. And so do many of our friends.

But back in 2018, in time for Holy Week, I did the ultimate O.B.T. with my friends Xandro “Chucky” Dael and Felix Dela Peña Mosqueda III: to go around Negros Island at the top of Holy Thursday, and return to Dumaguete at the end of Easter Sunday. Our haphazard aim was to see if we could do it, and also to see the various sites in our island that we’d heard so much about but never got to see, because life was always busy. I also decided to do, on a lark, a bit of heritage documentation: I wanted to photograph every single Jose Rizal statue in all the towns and cities we passed by, and to photograph every parish church.

You need four things to be able to go around Negros Island in four days:

First, have an absolute and heedless denial in impossibility. This is essential. An impromptu O.B.T. around an island as huge as Negros will have most people say, “No, thank you.” We said yes instead.

Second, have a company of a few friends to share the madness with. Chuck and I have always shared a love for traveling—we used to do staycations a lot—although we differ greatly in our estimation of what constituted great accommodations: I love the rustic charms of nipa hut resorts, and he loves them chic and modern. Nonetheless, I love going on daytrips with him—something we actually hadn’t done ever since the pandemic happened. But in 2018, we just decided out of the blue to take this O.B.T. trip. It was completely decided on a whim when we were chatting on Facebook one night right around the beginning of Holy Week, and I think I said something like, “My dream is to do an O.B.T. of Negros Island.” And he replied: “Let’s do it this Thursday.” And that was that.

Problem was, I don’t drive—so it was left to Chucky to do all of the driving around Negros Island, 206 kilometers of nautical highway in total. [The poor guy developed a wrist problem right after.] Also, I’m such a bad companion on the road: I always fall asleep the moment the car I’m in speeds on a highway. Good thing we had Felix to accompany us. He provided the laughs, especially when I slept, and he was there to break whatever indecisiveness the two primary instigators of the trip landed ourselves into. [In the meantime, I charted our trip, determined our stops, decided on the tourist spots to visit, and booked all the hotels.]

Third, have a car that’s stocked up with gasoline and chichirya for the road. This is a must.



Fourth, have a good map to track where you might stay for every stop for the night. Since we only had four full days to do a complete trip, I determined that we needed to do three nightly stops. I decided that our first stop should be in Negros Oriental—and that should be Canlaon City, right at the border of the two provinces, and which would provide us with our only excursion to the interiors of the island, and at least see Kanlaon Volcano and pay homage to the gods from the vantage point of what is said to be the oldest balete tree in all of the island. We earlier determined not to visit the interior towns for lack of time, hence no stops in Pamplona, Mabinay, Don Salvador Benedicto, La Castellana, Moises Padilla, and Isabela.

In Canlaon, we stayed at Mountain Citi Hostel, and enjoyed our first O.B.T. night going around the mountain city at dusk, looking for cheap food, and pondering about the first day of madness we just went through. Our first leg from Dumaguete to Canlaon was probably our most familiar trip, because we’d been through these cities and towns before—but doing it during Holy Thursday added a different flavor to the trip. When we stopped by Tanjay, we managed to catch a glimpse at the Semana Sanata kasikas in this most Catholic of Oriental Negrense cities. It was interesting. The Oriental towns going north also increasingly became rustic, and because I was documenting all the parish churches, it was jarring for me to take note that they became more garish the more up north we went, save for Tayasan’s. Also, we couldn’t find the poblacion of Vallehermoso, so we skipped that. [Truth: I have never seen the población of Vallehermoso.]



On our second leg, we started by going from Canlaon City to San Carlos City—a city I love—and then we were on a route that was no longer familiar to us. We were now in the Occidental side of Negros, although all the towns until Manapla—which includes Calatrava, Toboso, Escalante City, Sagay City, and Cadiz City—were all Cebuano-speaking. But suddenly in Manapla, while we were looking for the Gaston heritage house where Peque Gallaga filmed Oro Plata Mata, we started hearing more Hiligaynon, just like a switch being turned on. [Also in Manapla, we chanced upon the Chapel of the Cartwheels—something we did not plan to visit at all, but glad we did. It was near the Gaston house anyway.]

It was also around here that I really began to feel the grand sugar heritage of my island. Sure, I’ve seen sugar haciendas in Bais and Tanjay, and in Sta. Catalina and Pamplona—but the sugar fields of Northern Negros are something else altogether—a vastness of sugar fields that essentially serve as time machines. In Victorias City, we decided to visit St. Joseph the Worker Chapel, commonly known as the Church of the Angry Christ, which is located inside the Victorias Milling Company—just to see the famous mural done by Filipino-American modernist painter Alfonso Ossorio in 1950. Also in Victorias City, we witnessed the biggest Santo Entierro procession we have ever seen in our whole lives, and we made this strange distinction: Oriental towns and cities seemed to go into somber mode during Holy Week, while Occidental towns and cities were practically using the high holy days as a chance to, well, party. There was such a festive atmosphere the moment we entered Victorias, and which carried us all the way through our trip to the southern Occidental towns. Another observation we made: Occidental towns and cities really do flaunt their wealth—you could see it in the ornate [and preserved] architecture and other infrastructures, even in the smallest of towns. The whole thing brought a certain honesty in the Occidental Negrense boast, “Sa amon ya, ang kwarta ginapala, ginapiko.” It’s true.

This second leg would end in Silay City, where I chose the German Unson heritage house, now a thriving bread-and-breakfast, to be our second stop for the night. I thought that there was just no other way to stay in Silay—a city famous for its heritage houses from the heyday of the sugarcane decades—except be in an actual heritage house. We did our requisite tour of all the sugar houses in Silay—which, lucky for us, were all open on a Holy Friday. But all of us had been to Silay before and had done this heritage tour, so we soon opted to loiter around town looking for a place to eat—and even though the city was festive and full of people, we could not find a single restaurant that was open. We ended up buying diyes chicken off the streets, and spent the evening under the shadow of the grand San Diego Pro-Cathedral.



We began our third leg by leaving for Bacolod mid-morning. We didn’t really intend to stay and explore Bacolod, because we’d all been here before—but we took time to take a photo of the San Sebastian Cathedral, and a photo of the Jose Rizal statue along Araneta Avenue. We knew the road to Sipalay, our third stop, would be long—the longest leg ever in our O.B.T.—so we immediately went our way, although we decided to bypass the sea route after Bacolod to do a quick interior look at Murcia and Bago City, where we promptly got lost on our way to find an exit to Pulupandan. We laughed nervously when we finally found our bearings, knowing we lost an hour or so going round and round the interiors, and then it was smooth-sailing to Kabankalan. From there, we were finally in the heel of our boot-shaped island, the southern tropical wilderness of Ilog and Cauayan—which was absolutely beautiful for its density of foliage. It was nearing nighttime when we reached Cauayan, and then suddenly we were in the middle of a heavy downpour. We weren’t even near our destination yet! We braved on in the uncomfortable darkness that suddenly was everywhere, the highway blurry in the rain. Finally, after a few apprehensive hours, we did reach Sipalay.

What Chuck and Felix did not know however is that I booked us accommodations, not in Sipalay itself, but in Sugar Beach—a cove which was only accessible via a pump boat the resort was sending us. In the increasing darkness of evening, around 8 PM, while the rain was petering out but was still quite strong, we finally boarded the pump boat on rough seas, with rainwater and seawater drenching all of us. It was in this condition—fun for me, but horrifying to Chuck and Felix—that we finally reached Driftwood Village Resort, a place I’d stayed in from a few years back when I spent an entire Holy Week vacation with my brother Edwin. The rain was no longer as harsh when we settled in for the night, and we spent dinnertime in the company of hippies and expats. By Easter Sunday morning, the sun was out in full force—and Chuck and Felix finally found out why Sugar Beach is called exactly that: the fineness of the sand and the gloriousness of the view were all worth last night’s heavy rain. It was beautiful.



By noon, we were preparing to go on our final leg—the homestretch to Dumaguete after a brief stopover in Bayawan, Chuck’s hometown and mine, to visit family and friends. It was already late in the afternoon when we started on that final stretch—but not without a final decision: “Do we go through Pamplona, or through Siaton?” I opted for Siaton, knowing I could catch more photos of churches and Rizal statues that way.

We arrived in Dumaguete near dusk, stopping for a bit at M.L. Quezon Park to behold our Jose Rizal statue and our Cathedral of St. Catherine of Alexandria, just within a stone’s throw of each other. We were finally home—and our O.B.T. was a grand success I don’t think the three of us could surpass again.

So, which churches were the prettiest and grandest? Silay’s, hands down, architecture-wise. Art-wise, the Church of St. Joseph the Worker in Victorias, but Manapla’s Church of the Cartwheels is fantastic for its idiosyncracies. But in terms of traditional feel, Bacong, Dumaguete, Bacolod, Pontevedra, and Valladolid were the tops—although Valladolid’s has terrible interiors. The churches in the south side of Oriental are older and more beautiful, but in the north side, especially after Bais, not so much, except for Tayasan and Amlan, the latter which somehow managed to preserve the old architecture. In terms of lovable strangeness, I love the parish churches of Cadiz, Bais, and Amlan. The saddest were the churches in San Jose, Toboso, Basay, and Ayungon. And the most disappointing is probably Tanjay. For an old parish, its church is unbelievably garish.

As for the Rizal statue documentation, that’s another story.

Labels: holy week, life, negros, travel

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Wednesday, July 01, 2020

7:40 AM | Mementos

It’s sometimes curious to consider the mementos we keep of the places we’ve lived in. It has been 22 years since Tokyo, and when I think of that time I find myself willing me to even believe that was true, once upon a time, and not just a vividly remembered dream. I have other keepsakes—three full albums of photos and collages, a kaleidoscope I bought in Kyoto, a sake bottle. I still wear my haori yukata when I feel like it. And that’s it, and they feel increasingly removed from time, mementos of mementos.

Labels: life, memories, travel

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Sunday, April 01, 2018

8:00 PM | End of the Long Negros Island OBT

And I finally did it! I'm back in Dumaguete. Four days, three major stops, 35 towns and cities, 763 kilometers, and twenty-four total hours of driving later, I've officially accomplished one major item in my bucket list: a #NegrosIslandOBT. Thanks to my fantastic companions, Xandro Dael a.k.a. Driver, and Felix Dela Peña Mosqueda III a.k.a. Caterer.



Everything starts with a whim, a small measure of guts, and the mindset of just heading out into the unknown. To appropriate the quote from the cross-country hiker in the documentary In Pursuit of Silence, "We can come up with reasons for doing anything, but only in doing it can we really understand it. [Our] intuition was that it was a good thing to do, that [doing this was] important to do in many ways and should be explored, not explained.

Labels: friends, life, negros, travel

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Saturday, March 31, 2018

10:00 PM | Briefly From Our Negros Island OBT

We ended our first leg in the mountains of Canlaon, and our second leg in the heritage city of Silay via San Carlos and Cadiz. This time we were headed to white sandy beaches down south, in Sipalay. After Bacolod, we got lost for an hour in the interiors of Bago, looking for their Rizal statue [which we never found], because Google Maps, which we have christened Magta [as in "magtanong"], was leading us all over the place, going nowhere. We found our bearings again in Valladolid, which meant we skipped Pulupandan. After Kabankalan, going through the vast expanse of Ilog and Cauayan, it began to rain hard, and by the time we reached the outskirts of Sipalay, it was dark and rainy, although thank God there was no wind. We crossed the sea from Poblacion Beach to Sugar Beach, thirty minutes away, under the intense night sky, drenched to our skin because of sea and rain, staring into the dark with the hum of motorboat and the mild rocking of waves for company, our beacon the far off pinpricks of light that would prove to be our home for the night. It has been an adventure.

#NegrosIslandOBT

Labels: life, negros, travel

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Friday, March 30, 2018

11:11 PM | Rizal in Negros

I decided to document all the Rizal monuments in Negros Island during this OBT trip. Starting in Dumaguete, going north and counter-clockwise, we've stopped in every town and city along the nautical highway [we omitted the ones inland] and took photos of the Rizal statue there. We discovered that most statues followed a template, although the execution of each one is apparently directly proportional to the wealth of the town or city. Some however are quite dramatic, like the Rizal statue in Cadiz City where the national hero is depicted in the instance of death, with Inang Bayan holding him in the manner of a Pieta. Some towns however -- like Bindoy, Canlaon, Calatrava, and Toboso -- don't seem to have Rizal statues, or have forgotten where they are. I asked one person in Toboso why they don't have a statue, and her answer was: "Kay purdoy man mi." In Escalante, their Rizal monument is located in Baranggay Rizal, 15 kilometers away from the city proper -- an instance of us looking for a needle in a haystack. We're still in Silay right now, on the way to Sipalay next.

Labels: monuments, negros, Rizal, travel

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Sunday, December 03, 2017

12:54 PM | Dolce Vita

I have just finished off the last bite of some impossibly sweet chocolate cheesecake from Calea. It is 2 AM on a Friday, the robust sugary rush is keeping me awake by design, and I find myself staring into the early morning darkness outside my hotel room window at Circle Inn along Lopez Jaena Street in Bacolod.

I am thinking about the long hours ahead I will have to spend on the road back home to Dumaguete aboard the ubiquitous yellow bus that has come to stand in for Negros travel, and as usual I am ambivalent about the very act of travel—it’s starting stances anyway.

There is no wish to pack, to be honest, no wish to start moving, in anticipation of travel.

In fact, I should have been home already. But somehow, on a whim, while I was lolling about in another hotel bed, in Avenue Suites Hotel along Lacson Street, at the same exact early morning time the day before, I had convinced myself I needed to stay one more day in Bacolod. And after finding out my Avenue Suites room was no longer available, I quickly booked myself another hotel online, marveling at the ease of how these things go these days, and marveling even more at my impulsiveness to stay.

This is not my first time in Bacolod. I had come here for the first time years and years before, on a field trip during college I could remember only in bits and pieces. There were two other times I visited, but always on a rush of some business or other—and once with a boyfriend whose father died the very day we arrived in Bacolod for a vacation, and so we had to rush home the very next day for the funeral.

So Bacolod has always remained a blur—made familiar and distinct only in the films of Peque Gallaga, in the short stories and essays of Rosario Cruz Lucero, in the novels of Vicente Garcia Groyon. When I arrived via Ceres last Monday morning, I swore to myself I’d play the role of the tourist to the hilt, when I can. It was time to get to know this city of smiles, this side of Negros island.



I had a simple Bacolod bucket list.

I swore to eat inasal in Aida’s at the manokan.

I swore to walk the length of Lacson Street—because the only way to get to know a city, at least in the blushing stages of acquaintance, is to walk along its main artery. Google Map tells me the route is long, but I told myself that if I was able to walk the length of Broadway from Times Square to the World Trade Center one long autumn afternoon in New York, I could do Bacolod’s Lacson Street.

I swore to have a photo of me taken at The Ruins in Talisay, to be able to finally jump into the bandwagon of Facebook-posting the very experience.



(I thought about visiting the Angry Christ mural at Victorias—but that felt like a stretch of effort I could not afford to do.)

I came, of course, for an official function: the National Committee on Cinema of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts were holding our annual out-of-town meeting in Bacolod, timing it perfectly to coincide with the first edition of the Sine Negrense: The Negros Island Film Festival, which was being produced by the Negros Museum, with funding from the Film Development Council of the Philippines. The members of the NCC were to serve as resource speakers for various fora on film, and as jury members to select the winners of its two competitive exhibitions.



The days since November 17 were hectic and packed, and did not allow much room for the touristic idyll I had planned. But it was a great time to keep in touch with friends in the arts such as Sine Negrense festival director Adrian Torres, cultural worker Rudy Reveche, and film producer Ria Limjap; make new ones like filmmaker Ben Scharlin and the Negros Museum’s indefatigable Tanya Lopez, and rub elbows with film luminaries like Peque.

And rub elbows as well, and be inspired by, the young filmmakers from all over Negros—both Occidental and Oriental—who now constitute what Peque called the “fourth wave” of Negrosanon filmmaking: from the first generation of Eddie Romero and Cesar Amigo, to the second generation of Peque Gallaga, to the third generation of Erik Matti, Jay Abello, and Richard Somes, to this new one that seems to have risen organically, coming to form as a loose cinematic movement on its own, as Peque himself admitted it during the closing night of the film festival: “We had nothing to do with you, you came to filmmaking on your own volition, and I am amazed and happy.”



“Happy and amazed” very much spells the reception we gave these films from Bacolod, Dumaguete, Silay, and elsewhere. In the end, what took the top prizes were Belle Kay Loyola’s Dalit in the open competition, and Carlo Navarrete’s Singgit sang Nalisdan in the inter-collegiate competition. Dumaguete’s two entries, Val Amiel Vestil’s Adobo and Paul Benzi Florendo’s Hawud, garnered several nominations, with Hawud winning for Best Musical Score.

Still, we—film archivist Teddy Co, film educators Jag Garcia, Patrick Campos, Art Tibaldo, and Rosanni Sarile, film critic Tito Valiente, and film director Baby Ruth Villarama—managed to cram in some tourist time, including the aforementioned inasal at Aida’s on our first night in town. And after the whirlwind of lecturing, judging, and meeting, we hopped on a van to Talisay for The Ruins, and then Silay for the heritage houses. It was a long and happy Wednesday afternoon of fun and laughter, and of food. Glorious, glorious food.



That’s two out of three of my Bacolod intentions down.

When I finally decided to stay one more day, I spent Thursday morning relaxing, noontime transferring to another hotel, afternoon visiting the new government center along the Circumferential Road at Brgy. Villamonte, just because—I actually wanted to walk there from my hotel thinking it was an easy walk, until the hotel security guard strongly advised me to take a taxi, and he was right!—and early evening looking at art over at Gallery Orange at the Mandalagan part of Lacson Street. There, I met Toto Tarrosa, who was glad to know Aida’s inasal was very much a part of my Bacolod bucket list.

Afterwards, there I was: at that part of Lacson—the long stretch ahead towards the provincial capitol an invitation. “If I walk as far as Calea, will that be enough to complete my bucket list?” I asked myself.

I decided it was enough. Passing by Robinsons Place, I did a long detour by watching the new Murder on the Orient Express, and then, when that was over, I continued down Lacson until I finally saw the bright lights of Bacolod’s esteemed cake shop.

Which is how I ended up with that slice of cheesecake I began this article with. It’s 4 AM as I write this, and I’ve finally decided I’m going to take the 9:30 AM Ceres home.

Labels: film, food, life, travel

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Sunday, March 26, 2017

12:37 PM | The Places We Leave Behind Live On Without Us

There is almost nothing left of my childhood in Bayawan. The lot of that corner building, all concrete and hollowed out, used to be the house I grew up in. That lot with the trees and the little shed used to be where my Aunt Fannie’s house once stood. That NOVO store used to be the imposing El Oriente, the cinema where I saw my first movie in.

The cliches abound: everything has indeed become smaller. Only a muscular memory of things remain. For example, there is no getting lost in the maze of Bayawan’s little streets -- I find that a kind of compass remains deep within, and so while the corners and byways now look utterly unfamiliar, a quiet instinct takes over, gently telling me, “Turn this way, turn that way.”

Must I be sad that so much has changed? But what do we expect of places we leave behind really? Do we expect them to remain static in time, museums to our memories, embalmed and preserved and waiting for eternity for our inconstant returns where we can expect to embrace the comfortable unchanging of things, even as we leave, even as we change, even as we turn adult with all its attendant regrets? I don’t begrudge my childhood “erased” in Bayawan. Places have to live on without you. One has to learn the irrevocable truth that the past is a different life, a different country. You were a footnote in one chapter of this place’s story, and you had long since gone.

Labels: life, memories, travel

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Monday, January 02, 2017

1:02 PM | Daygon at Lilo-an

On the way home to Dumaguete from Cebu last December 30, we found our van in a standstill on the port of Lilo-an in Santander town, in a long line of cars waiting to board the barge during the New Year crush. While waiting, we found ourselves listening to a bunch of singers doing the "daygon," a traditional Christmas song in Cebuano that's rarely performed these days. Leo Mamicpic decided to catch them on video. Here's that video, where the violinist (!!!) starts with some riff off an old tune from the American south, segueing soon to more traditional fare. As a child I used to find these songs bizarre and old-fashioned. Now that I know how fast we are discarding our old traditions and heritage, they have become something to treasure and marvel at -- and one to definitely record and archive when you can.

Labels: art and culture, christmas, heritage, life, travel

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Friday, October 28, 2016

8:12 PM | Dasmariñas Dreaming

We were watching an old Gerardo de Leon movie from the 1960s, its beautiful masterly compositions marred forever — like an abundance of celluloid scars — by neglect and unlove. It was enough to make a cineast’s heart bleed. So, immediately following the post-screening dinner, we decided to catch a breather. “To see the town,” we said.

From the university entrance along Congressional Road in Dasmariñas, Cavite, we decided to follow our feet. It was really the best way to get around an unfamiliar place, to take in what we could of the local scene, and to be in the thick of things beyond the usual tourist claptrap. This was Katipunan country, after all. This was the birthplace of Emilio Aguinaldo. This was a place teeming with names straight off history books. That way to Imus. This way to Trece Martires. Further down is Silang.

I’ve only been here once before, but only in the most pedestrian manner, staying briefly with friends before heading off to Tagaytay nearby. This time, there was more opportunity to explore, and Dasmariñas beckoned like an adventure. “Let’s go to SM City,” Hobart said. “Let’s just take the jeepney and ask our way around” — which apparently had always been the modus all his life: I, on the other hand, lived in a fragile bubble that couldn’t see beyond a block away from my hotel room, but I was always willing to follow someone else’s lead in a blind rush to things unknown. SM City sounded like a foreign jungle, and so I said, “Let’s go.”

The traffic officer in the small island of the highway we came to told us we had to take a jeepney bound “this way” — and he indicated the direction with a wave of his hand, although we weren’t sure in the most particular way whether that was north or south or east or west. It was difficult to tell from the usual signs, the sun having long set. It was 7 PM, and we were feeling the thrill of Cavite’s equivalent of rush-hour traffic. We only knew that further down one direction of Congressional Avenue was a turn towards Aguinaldo St., leading to our hotel, the Volets, which sounded more like a robot, or a merry call to action, or a species of rare African flower. A woman in Maranao dress on the sidewalk with us told us we had to take the jeepney bound for Pala-pala and helpfully told us the fare going there (P12) — and on that eventual jeepney ride we took, I breathed in up-close, for the first time since I arrived, the interesting and teeming humanity of Dasmariñas — their looks, their gestures, their smells.

We soon got off some corner because the jeepney driver said so, and found the mall we came for to be a well-lit replica of every other SM we knew. Still, it was meant to be the start for an evening’s flaneuring adventure, and what better way to do that but make a commercial mecca the commencing step? We asked a boy in a red shirt: “What and where is the center of town, and are there bars there?” He said, “Bayan,” and yes, there were a few bars there, but he said we could do well with that where we were already: in this juncture of Dasmariñas where SM met Robinson’s Place.

But, nonetheless, we wanted to go to Bayan — which sounded so lovely to our ears. (“Taga saan ka?” one might ask, and the answer would be: “Taga-Bayan.” We giggled.) The boy told us that it was best to take a jeepney ride to Bayan (P7) from a corner near SM that had an old 7-Eleven. We went on our way, singing a mash-up of all the songs we knew that had “bayan” in its lyrics — from “Bayan Ko” to “Bayan Muna.”

Later that night, in the middle of Bayan — a quaint stretch that immediately felt like home — we would end up drinking beer in a place called Thai, and eating bucayo and calamay from a street vendor near a bridge we couldn’t bring ourselves to cross, and befriending in a jeepney a locquacious local girl named Pearl and her Japanese-Filipino friend named Maria, and watching a bunch of local boys play evening basketball on a court off City Hall, and watching a bevy of pretty twirlers practice a mean routine on a court off the Capital ng Dasmariñas, perhaps in preparation for the upcoming Paru-paro Festival.

The church itself took my breath away. To behold that old church in the evening light felt like a ghostly visit through a piece of history: people staked out a revolution against the Spanish from the confines of its stone walls, we read this from an inscription outside. And people also died there in the hands of the Japanese in the dark days of the Second World War. The front door of the church was an intricate work in wood, its sprawling surface — browned deeply — showcasing a carved narrative, with tableaus of scenes from both the Advent and Lent. And as we trailed our fingers across the impressions of those carved images, a family came: a mother, a father, their two very young children.





They came and strode quickly to the door in the dim light, and began earnestly touching its carved images like a fervent want of a blessing: the mother was touching each panel with such devotion and using those same hands to touch the head and face of her little child now being carried aloft by its father. She did that many times, and finally settled on one image, to which she brought the weight of all her prayers. I thought the scene touching, but also unreal: I had never seen such a personal ritual before, and I envied the mother’s belief in divine providence, whatever it was she was in earnest prayers for.

Was this how it was to get away from the routine of being a stranger in another town? To see things like this?

Only a few minutes later, we heard from across the courtyard the trills of orchestral music — something at once surprising, beautiful, mysterious, intriguing. An orchestra was playing from the open-air second floor of an old building right across the old church. From the porch, a bunch of women were looking out to the evening sky, and then they saw us approach.

“Can we listen to the music?” we asked.

They smiled, and gestured for us to come up the side staircase. Upstairs, filling up the entire floor, the Citizen’s Brigade Band of Dasmariñas — all of them various ages of young, from little tykes working the violin to preteen boys working the trombone and the flute — was rehearsing a piece titled “Ode to Music” under the watchful gaze of a portly, middle-aged maestro bearing his baton with a fatherly forcefulness. Once in a while, he’d tweak a bit, here and there, the playing by some of the instrumentalists. Then they finally came together in the end, reaching for their music to soar towards the Cavite stars.

It was a beautiful thing, that sensation of being embraced by music you only came across by accident of fate.



And in that space, on a balcony, watching both these children play music and the streets of Bayan below throb and flow with traffic of people and cars, I realized how it was to properly visit a place and make it familiar: get lost, get intimate with its rhythms, ask around. A hotel room is not the world.

Labels: life, travel

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Saturday, February 06, 2016

11:00 AM | Looking for Happy

Mandatory "I'm-finally-here" selfie from my hotel bed. I just ran away from home for the weekend in Cebu. No plans whatsoever, except some haphazard commitment that came on the fly to be interviewed by the University of San Carlos' Cebuano Studies Center for a project they're currently doing. I used to tell myself: "It would be nice to just hop on a random bus or boat, and go somewhere without really thinking about it." I kept telling myself that for years. Never did it. Until now. I should really run away from home more often.

Labels: life, travel

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Thursday, June 25, 2015

12:53 AM | June Has Been a Very Literary Month, Surprise Surprise

Labels: books, cebu, dumaguete, festivals, friends, life, philippine literature, travel, writers, writing

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Friday, March 30, 2012

9:27 PM | The Staycation Option

For the past few months, ever since I started work on my graduate thesis, I've developed this (highly expensive) habit of just leaving the too-comfortable confines of my apartment -- and checking into the AC-comforts of a hotel room. With a good bed. And good wifi. With the TV remote untouched, hotel rooms are great havens for people who need to finish things in relative comfort, without the distractions of home.

I've been frequenting this one new hotel right in the middle of downtown, which is rather cheap and comfortable -- save for the horrendous plastic flowers as decor, and the linoleum tiling in the bathroom that ultimately turns the entire showering adventure into something quite icky. (Bring slippers!) The hotel will, of course, remain unnamed.

But here is this new find. GoHotel just opened a branch in Dumaguete, and offered me a much welcome complimentary accommodations this weekend as it goes through its dry-run/soft opening. The rates, while not fixed (they have this Internet promo thing as a system), are quite remarkable considering the compact and inspired execution of the rooms, which, while tiny, are more than good enough for a traveling nomad, or a person bent on a staycation. Like I am. (I like what they say in their website: "We want you to sleep like royalty, but we won't ask you to fork over a king's ransom. Thanks to the year-round low rates, every Juan, Dick and Larry can afford hotel-quality sleeping experience.")

I love staycations. Staycations give me the thrill and the illusion of "travel" without me having to leave the city I am bound in because of work and other responsibilities. Staycations are cheap. They are relaxing. They give one a sense of the different that never fails to jog the imagination.

So here we are, on a Friday night, behind Robinson's Place in Dumaguete, checking into this bright spot...







This is the entrance to the hotel...



These are the wonderful members of the staff, Angelo and Reicha....



This is the corridor of the first floor. (The second floor is still being finished as I type.)



This is my room...



This is me inspecting the new (temporary) digs...



This is the bed, and now home of my gadgets...



This is the mandatory bathroom shot...



And this is me easing into the night, about to start writing/editing my novel, trying to find the courage to turn off the television...

So wish me luck, and may you have a great weekend ahead.

Labels: dumaguete, holidays, hotels, life, travel

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Thursday, September 29, 2011

10:51 PM | The Dangers of Comfort, The Theater of Dinner Conversation

And I don’t mean the pedestrian gossip that slakes over our dinner tables most of these days—although that, too, has its own perverted pleasures. The thrill of finding frail humanity among our kind. Schadenfreude as drama.

“Did you know so-and-so and so-and-so got together over the weekend?”

“Seriously? But what about so-and-so? Aren’t they living together?”

“Well, a little birdie told me that so-and-so has done this-and-that.”

“Oh. Em. Gee.”

Not that.

What I mean is dinner conversation of the illuminating kind—not about politics or religion, those two deadly bores. But about the place of humanity in the scheme of the universe, in philosophy—leavened, of course, by anecdotes from personal experience. Imagine a conversation about art, a painting or sculpture or what-not a friend of yours have seen in a museum which has touched him, which has given him fodder for thought. Imagine that friend as an impresario of talk. Over a three-course meal, pushed by the sweet intoxication of red wine, you hear him give a dramatic musing of what he has seen. You are both surrounded by kindred spirits, and the talk becomes organic, more philosophical, a little bit tipsy from the wine. There are affirmations, counter-arguments, jokes and laughter, more illuminating anecdotes. You leave that dinner table knowing you have learned a little bit more about the nature of humanity. You become, at least for a few hours during and after that dinner, a better human being—because you have partaken of a strange communion, a mix of food and words and friends.

I find myself in rare instances of this in Dumaguete. When the chance presents itself—usually in the delightful company of Dessa Quesada-Palm, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, Esther Windler, Cecilia Hoffman, Annabelle Lee-Adriano, Laurie Raymundo, Margaret Helen Udarbe, Betty McCann, Moses Joshua Atega, Patrick Chua, Myrish Antonio-Cadapan, Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio, Leo Mamicpic, Ben Malayang III and his wife Gladys, Myrna Pena-Reyes, Tata and Simon Stack, John Stevenson, and assorted artists/friends from Manila and elsewhere who would join us—I grab it, and I prepare for a night of scintillating talk, knowing it is good for the soul, and for the mind.



I thought as much when I saw the filmed dinner conversation between André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, playing versions of themselves in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André [1981]. This film, hailed as a unique cinematic experiment and is considered one of the best films to come out of the 1980s, is ripe with witticism, philosophical musings, and provocative thoughts, but this one strain of dialogue between the two struck me the most:

ANDRE: I mean, if you don't have that electric blanket, and your apartment is cold, and you need to put on another blanket or go into the closet and pile up coats on top of the blanket you have, well then you know it's cold. And that sets up a link of things: you have compassion for the p-- ... well, is the person next to you cold? Are there other people in the world who are cold? What a cold night! I like the cold, my God, I never realized, I don't want a blanket, it's fun being cold, I can snuggle up against you even more because it's cold! All sorts of things occur to you. Turn on that electric blanket and it's like taking a tranquilizer, it's like being lobotomized by watching television. I think you enter the dream world again. I mean, what does it do to us, Wally, living in an environment where something as massive as the seasons or winter or cold don't in any way affect us? I mean, we're animals after all. I mean, what does that mean? I think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and the sky and the stars we're living in a fantasy world of our own making.

WALLY: Yeah, but I mean, I would never give up my electric blanket, André. I mean, because New York is cold in the winter, I mean, our apartment is cold. It's a difficult environment! I mean, our lives are tough enough as it is, I'm not looking for ways to get rid of the few things that provide relief and comfort, I mean, on the contrary! I'm looking for more comfort, because the world is very abrasive, I mean, I'm trying to protect myself, because really there are these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look.

ANDRE: Yeah, but Wally, don't you see that comfort can be dangerous? I mean, you like to be comfortable and I like to be comfortable, too. But comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility. I mean, my mother knew a woman, Lady Hatfield, who was one of the richest women in the world, and she died of starvation because all she would eat was chicken. I mean, she just liked chicken, Wally, and that was all she would eat, and actually, her body was starving but she didn't know it 'cause she was quite happy eating her chicken and so, she finally died! See, I honestly believe that we're all like Lady Hatfield now, we're having a lovely, comfortable time with our electric blankets and our chicken, and meanwhile we're starving because we're so cut off from contact with reality that we're not getting any real sustenance. 'Cause we don't see the world. We don't see ourselves. We don't see how our actions affect other people.

[The transcript of the film can be read here.]

End scene.

The dangers of comfort. That made me take pause. Because I have been thinking about this for some days now. And there it was, the whole notion of it, discussed at length in one of the best films of all time. And I have just stumbled on it, like the “omens” they talk about in the film. Is this film my own form of Wally’s fortune cookie?

A few days ago, I posted this status update in my Facebook wall: “I don’t know what the Universe is trying to tell me these days, but I’m willing to listen.” The things is, I have been out-of-sorts lately, bombarded by tiny problems with magnificent wings which I can’t talk about to anybody, trying to make sense out of ... something. I had no idea what was bothering me, but I have been feeling odd. Strangely sad, feeling blue. And so I popped in this film like I have always promised myself I would. And I’m glad I did.

And what a beautiful film it is. When it ended, I just stared and stared off into space as the end titles rolled over Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, and I was thinking about the things they were talking about: theater, domesticity, the imprisonment of comfort, how life must be lived when one realizes how we have forgotten to connect... I think this is one film one should watch when one turns 36 (Wallace’s age when this was made). I’m 36 now, and I love the film because I feel it now, more thoroughly, because of having have lived. Because the questions it asks are things I have come to know through all those years. I wouldn’t have gotten this film when I was 21.

Amy Taubin in the Criterion website captures exactly what I felt upon finishing: “And then the dinner is over. Nothing is concluded—not for Wally or André, and certainly not for the audience. But on the way home, Wally is surprised to find that something has changed in the way he attends to the city as he sees it from the taxi window. And that slight shift in consciousness is what André ... would have applauded. And we might do the same as the image fades to black.”

The film finally reminds me that I need to have dinner with my good people again. Because you need these little events of gab to go beyond the vapidity of everyday life, the drone of television, the mindless cares of zombies around you. A dinner conversation is a small strike against the electric blanket of life. It is rare when the right talk chemistry sparks, and so when it happens, one has to be of mind to cherish it.

Labels: film, life, philosophy, theater, travel

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Friday, July 15, 2011

8:22 PM | The Gusto of Presko

Part 2 of a series on Dumaguete food

Labels: dumaguete, food, negros, travel

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7:45 PM | A Primer for Table-Hopping in Dumaguete

Part 1 of a series on Dumaguete food


Every time a traveler comes to Negros Oriental, I am always asked the same two things, the first being an inquiry about the local delicacy, some edible pasalubong to take home. That has become a kind of touristic expectation—Cebu with its lechon and chicharon, for example, or Bohol with its kalamay and peanut kisses.

Such query used to vex me. What do we exactly eat in Negros Oriental that is worthy of culinary tourism?



Over time, it has become easy to answer. My roots being Bayawan, a small city in the southern part of the island looking out towards Sulu Sea, I am ready to pronounce the gustatory delights of baye-baye, a kind of sweet cake made of sticky rice and coconut—and thinking of it now brings on a surfeit of childhood memories. I’m imagining the burst of sticky sweetness that explodes on the tongue, and the way the paste lolls around the mouth.

Then there’s Tanjay’s budbud named after itself or Dumaguete's budbud kabog—the two towns' version of puto bungbung, really. (Alas, why it’s named after the local species of bat is beyond me.)

In Dumaguete, the easy answer has come to be the silvanas from Sans Rival, that quaint cake house near the Rizal Boulevard that has found a solid way to make this frozen delicacy of a pastry last a plane ride by coming in pasalubong variety: its powdery shell is made extra hard, which preserves the quick-melting creamy heaven inside.

The second query, still about food, has nothing to do with pasalubongs, but everything to do with the matter of solving any current pangs of hunger. If one is a stranger to Dumaguete, where do you exactly go that would also define a sense of place? To eat where the locals gather is, in a sense, getting to know well the stirrings of every day life as it exists in this peculiar spot of geography. This one goes beyond considerations of fast food. You do not go to another place to have Jollibee.

But if “definition of a place” must be a criterion, you could always start with this one kind of fast food popular in the city: the “tempura,” a flour-coated something (definitely not shrimp—but it sure does taste a little like it), which is an unhealthy mix of MSG and deep-frying oil. But locals do gravitate towards the tempurahan, how we call this spot at the head of the stretch of paseo, at the corner fronting old Sillliman Hall, which is the city’s picturesque Rizal Boulevard. At night, the place turns into a haven for moon-seekers, its acacia-lined stretch overlooking the dark currents of Tañon Strait lit orange by lights emanating from Corinthian lampposts that dot it. Many years ago, a city mayor once thought of doing away with the “tempura” vendors, their makeshift chairs and colorful beach umbrellas considered an “eyesore” in the midst of the Boulevard’s Spanish/American feel. And then the New York Times, in its travel article about Dumaguete, splashed images of the tempurahan in its pages. It became an instant curiosity of a place, a tourist spot. The order was withdrawn, and so the tempurahan stands where it is until now, gentrified a little bit, the vendors now in uniform. (The tempura is also available with hot sauce, and coupled with a bottle of Coke, it becomes a kind of feast. One has been known to devour fifteen pieces of it in one sitting.)

Dumaguete, for some reason, is in a culinary renaissance of some sort. It is a small revolution, but it sizzles still.

Why a revolution? Consider this. There used to be a time when dining out was a perennial problem in Dumaguete. Essentially a big town with small city airs, it was a place where nobody went out for dinner—and if they did, it was mostly a family affair that was quick, usually undistinguished, lacking the pizzazz of experience the way a place with a culture of dining out has. Which is why, for the longest time, what can be said to sum up a typical Dumaguete dining experience is the outdoor grill. Jo’s Chicken Inato is iconic in that tradition—its grilled chicken, marinated with a secret recipe of herbs and a milky what-not, is almost synonymous with the city. Today, that tradition, always done al fresco, has expanded a little bit with City Burger (which is not known for burgers, but for barbecued chicken dipped in a tantalizingly sweet sauce—a real experience, if you have the patience to spare with its gruffy and belligerent waiters and waitresses, who seem to begrudge your very presence for some reason), and with Atong Kamalig, also near the Boulevard, with its smorgasbord of grilled meat and funky-sounding bands. More recently, there’s Sundown, near the intersection that leads to Robinson’s Place—a beautifully landscaped beer garden, complete with the alfresco feel, that transcends whatever image it wants to project to offer some of the most surprising cooking in town. Surprising because you don’t expect so much from such a small place. Still, it has the imprimatur of Santa Monica’s kitchen, which says a lot about the seriousness of its food.

In consequence, we only had a few restaurants with slim culinary imaginations, coming and going in fashion. The local cheese burger that defined Dumaguete the most had always been the one from Taster’s Delight, an institution now gone, much to the lamentations of several generations of students in this University Town for whom its delectable blend of sauce created magic with its patty. North Pole Emilia and its glorious coco flan are also gone, and so has Dockside with its late-night feasts of tocilog and its other -log cousins. And who remembers Blue Oyster in Sibulan? Jumong, a Korean restaurant in the bowels of Portal West, has also disappeared into kimchi hell. Then most recently, the closing of Gimmik, which prompted an overwhelming response for a sense of loss for its "perfect" sisig, its sun-roasted pork belly, its Peruvian steak, its calamares, its sinugbang isol...

Gone, too, is Sampan Food Haus near Don Bosco, which was the closest Dumagueteños could get to good Hong Kong-type dining—Chinese food with a street flair. Italia, that glorious Italian restaurant near Avenida Sta. Catalina, is also now gone—and all I have left of it are memories of its delicious carpaccio di Resce con verdure marinale—a thin slice of tuna with marinated vegetables that simply melted in my mouth—which I had for antipasti, and the bistecca Italia (succulent beef tenderloin sautéed in extra virgin oil, with carrots, potatoes, and herbs) and bistecca di Pepe (grilled tenderloin steak with black pepper). What proved to be its demise? Its pricey fare, in a city that is quite notorious for wanting its fine dining within the budget of a take-out from McDonald’s.

A growing city—and its increasingly ravenous appetites—changes with time. It is an inevitability. Our favorite food places come and go in fashion. Our shifting standards dictate it. The menu is now a mess, we say. The place has lost its charm. The toilet looks dirty and forbidding, so you can imagine how the kitchen must be. The prices are just a little too steep for what looks like a carinderia. The menu, alas, is now a mess.

But we eat out more and more still, the city changing and becoming more cosmpolitan under our feet, and the restaurants continue to mushroom with much hope—and most of the time, they just vanish like stale French fries.

Some food places and their famous dishes, of course, stay for good: the pinsik from Rago’s; the addicting cheese bread and fruit mix from Silliman Cafeteria; the spaghetti carbonara from Chantilly; the lechon manok from Golden Roy’s and Manok ni San Pedro; the cheese de sal from Mrs. Breadworth in Lee Super Plaza; the steak from Le Chalet in Why Not; the kebab in Persian Palate (now Tandoori); the grilled squid from Mamia’s; the crispy pata from Santa Monica; the tocino from Manang Siony’s; the pastries and cakes from Ana Maria; the cafeteria spread and dimsum from Howyang; the batchoy and arroz ballao from Qyosko (and sometimes its delicious dulce de leche cheesecake, or Oreo white chocomousse, or milk chocomousse); and the homemade ice cream and organic chicken steamed rice from Panda Haus.

There is still the Rosante, along Perdices Street, which after it burned down a few years ago, became the more posh Don Roberto’s, and still serves its famous roasted chicken. La Caviteña may now be a shadow of its former self—but it’s still there, hanging on. Chin Loong, with its pseudo-Chinese menu, has had its ups and downs (and now it looks like it’s in the ups again), and CocoAmigos, with its once delightful Mexican whimsy, has been in steady decline for the past few years, its go-go musical acts on weekends becoming an Angeles City kind of attraction. Baduy. So we stay away.

For dressy fares, you go to Fuh Garden (what used to be Mei Yan); or to Casablanca—or if you had a car, all the way to Atmosphere in Dauin, or to any of the resorts that dot that beach town. (We used to frequent this delightful little Thai restaurant called Sawasdee in Tanjay—which was quaint enough to patronize largely due to the distance and effort, and the food was truly brilliant, never mind the hangers of dreadful RTW crowding out the make-do tables and chairs. Once it made the move to Dumaguete, however, it carried its barriotic eccentricities with it, and was promptly shunned by the AB-aspirational crowd that’s the Dumaguete bourgeoisie. Everything in food, you see, rests on reputation, in a region that takes its sugarlandia air with utter seriousness.)

Most often, we go to La Residencia Hotel’s two restaurants—Don Atilano for its steak or Wakagi for its Japanese fare. I go to Don Atilano sometimes for breakfast, when I am bored and have a hankering for tapa or daing na bangus or danggit or tocino or Spanish chorizo or double-fried adobo, peculiarly prepared the Don Atilano way. (Which is, well, snobbish.) But my most memorable dinner here was not its famous steak—which is as ordinary as they come—but with its sake-marinated Norwegian salmon (complete with roasted shallots, mandarin orange and greens, served with soba glazed in teriyake sauce), coupled with its lengua bordelaise (which is ox tongue braised in bordelaise sauce and cooking wine), its bacalao (cod fish fillet sautéed and simmered in rich tomato and olive oil), its roast chicken with pesto butter, and its seared fillet of dory over shrimp ravioli sautéed on butter and shitake mushroom and topped over shrimp ravioli on heavy cream. That was one truly memorable dinner, something I shared with friends with similar tastes for culinary adventures—but since La Residencia’s latest remodeling, its old charm has been lost to its shiny new chrome and wood finish. Even its brewed coffee, which was once praised by The New York Times as probably one of the best in this part of the world, has lost something of its magic.

Things have changed. That much can be said. The city has changed. Today, with a new Robinson’s mall south of downtown, the choices have become a little more crowded. Not in the same way that Cebu or Manila or Bacolod do it, but nevertheless it’s a stirring of sorts, perhaps a sign of better things to come. There’re already Gabby’s Bistro and Jutz’s Café (formerly Boston Café) and Neva’s and Likha and KRI and Mamia’s and Royal Suite in the mix. Sans Rival has expanded from the small pastry shop of our collective memories, to become a full-fledged restaurant, open even on Sundays. There’s even a new Thai restaurant, an affair called Ti Ban Thai along San Juan Street, a stone’s throw away from Sans Rival, where the waitresses remind me of the girls in Patpong—scantily dressed, luring in a specific kind of customer. (Here, I ordered kai sate for appetizer and pad thai for dinner. The kai sate tasted like an afterthought, its meat brittle-tasting verging on the merely okay. Dipped in generous peanut paste, its pad thai was a little more passable, its noodles had a respectable consistency, and it had the surprising earthy airiness of sprouted mung beans; the whole thing, caked in a mushy layer of fried scrambled eggs, seemed like something concocted with an eagerness to please.)

Over the past year or two, I have gone on random food adventures with three other friends, each of us equipped with a role—Moses Joshua Atega acted as our liaison man for restaurants around town, Greg Morales was food photographer, and Arlene Delloso-Uypitching was newly-discovered food stylist.

The following articles in this series are an account of our tasting trips, which became, in essence, a culinary discovery of some of the best that Dumaguete had to offer.

There are two kinds of articles about food: one talks with such specificity about the dish in consideration and the reach is for the technical, an examination of ingredients and process; the other talks about the experience of the partaking, which is how I approach food appreciation. It is for me a kind of theater of gustatory delight that is part communal act (we call that a “feast”) and part individual meditation, done in bites, for the pleasures that life can offer.

This will be an attempt to do the latter... [To be continued...]



[Crossposted in a different form in TravelBook.ph]

Labels: dumaguete, food, negros, travel

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Friday, June 10, 2011

4:21 PM | Nabiyaang Tamawo

Since last Sunday night, there are spectral figures wading the shallows off the Boulevard in Dumaguete. You can see them as you cruise the street, before you turn right towards Burgos Street. They will strike you as uncanny. Perhaps. The three figures in white -- white plaster bodies in white sheaths -- are tamawos, the artists who made them tell us. To be more specific, "mga nabiyaang tamawo." Left-behind spectral figures of myths; tamawos, according to legend, are a kind of encantos, humanoid creatures of supreme powers, light-skinned, most of whom live in trees where they maintain huge (but invisible to the naked eye) kingdoms of fabulous riches, fantastic realms into which they tempt people they have fallen in love with to enter and leave the human world forever.





These tamawos on the sea, ghostly white and faceless, are somewhat of an indifferent sort: these ones turn their back to us observing them from along the shore or along the cemented walkways of the seaside promenade. Their frozen walk simulates that attentive grazing of shore in lookout for what's hidden beneath sand and beach rocks. They also seem inattentive even of each other, and that stance, looking out (but barely) into the dark vastness and oblivion of the Tañon Strait, seems sad and forlorn and beautiful and evocative of what life can be found in this lively, isolating stretch of this lovely, sad, small city. I can now imagine these figures, once the klieg lights that illuminate them are turned off, to seem ephemeral and lost in the Dumaguete darkness. And what of them in the light of morning tide? Figures wading chest-deep, still inattentive to the fact of the possibility of drowning.



Photography by Razceljan Salvarita.

Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, negros, photography, travel

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