Peaking out the window of my hotel room’s bathroom this morning, I was greeted with clear blue skies. That’s great after so much rain. However, as in life, the change in weather brings bad as well as good. It was sunny yesterday, too, and the heat was hard to deal with and retain a “sunny” disposition. I don’t imagine the heat will be any friendlier today.

I’ve eaten all my meals at the same restaurant so far and I had yesterday’s breakfast there, too. I believe it is called Saley’s Express Food . Their prices are a fair bit higher than typical food hauses (“haus” being the local spelling for “house”), but it’s worth it. Their food is presented in individual servings with set prices on display. It’s very good food and there is a lot of seating plus a bathroom.

After breakfast, I grabbed my camera and wandered over to Hollywood Jetty to see about tracking down the sister and brother of the barangay captain I’d met earlier. I ended up leaving behind the piece of paper with their names and addresses, so I can’t remember their names.

I had to smile as I walked along the jetty. The barangay captain had just written down “Gety Street” on his paper, and being an ex-policeman himself he told me to only ask a policeman for directions when I got here. In the end, I didn’t need directions because I stumbled across the Hollywood Jetty by accident and eventually made the connection that by Gety he had meant Jetty. What made me smile is that the barangay captain neglected to describe this street. It’s not like it was just one of dozens of streets in the town. It is a street that stretches a half kilometer out into the ocean along a narrow stone jetty. It is not only unique in this town but perhaps in the entire world. Telling me about its unique nature would have assisted me greatly in finding it.

I didn’t ask about the family right away. I wanted to walk to the end of the jetty and see if I could get a view of the ocean and the surrounding town. Lots of people were outside their homes and hanging out – mostly young people – and they called out the usual greetings and asked me to take their picture. I obliged a few of them, but none of the pictures turned out very well. I wasn’t in the mood to take pictures, and I find that my mood influences the pictures I take a great deal.

Even the end of the jetty consisted of a jumble of rough buildings and structures, but there was a dock there and a small open space. A lot of young children were there playing and swimming in the ocean. They surrounded me and overwhelmed me with their questions. They were a boisterous bunch and they asked their series of questions in English in rapid fire fashion and all at the same time. As the competition for my attention heated up, the volume began to rise until I couldn’t bear it anymore and I had to move away to calm things down. I took a couple of pictures while I was there and by accident, one of them turned out well.

I almost left the area without inquiring about this family. I’d been exhausted by all the attention I received, and I didn’t have much energy to be social. However, I felt it was my duty to find them and say hello, and I showed the names and addresses to the first mature man that I saw. He recognized the names instantly and sent a younger man to bring me to their house.

I believe, now that I think about it, that the woman’s name was Lourdes. She came to the gate of her house to meet me and looked extremely puzzled. Her brother, the barangay captain, was going to text her to tell her about me, but her phone is out of order and she never got the text. However, once she understood the situation, she invited me inside. Her house was fairly large and well-constructed for its neighborhood. There was a large fence and gate. On the other side of the gate was a collection of four motorcycles. The main room of the house was a combination living room and bedroom with some bunk beds against the far wall. Stepping through that room brought us to the kitchen and dining area, which sat on a wooden platform just above the water. From there, I could look back and see that the water extended under the rest of the house as well. Lourde’s son, Jessa, joined us and he told me later on that during high tide, the water sometimes came up through the floor boards and lightly flooded the dining area.

Lourdes was a friendly though somewhat shy woman. She was clearly a bit overwhelmed by my presence, but she was friendly and a very good hostess. She sent someone out to get a big bottle Coke. They had just finished their lunch and there were still containers of typical Filipino dishes spread out on the dining table. She asked if I wanted some food, and I explained that I’d just had a meal a few minutes earlier. This was taken as meaning that I didn’t like Filipino food, and other people were sent out to get bread and Spam for me. I stepped in and told her that I really did like Filipino food. I just wasn’t hungry right now and she needn’t really bother making a special effort to get food for me. That had little impact. She told me that it was the custom in the Philippines to feed their guests. Apparently, I was going to eat something no matter what.

The foragers returned with a loaf of white bread, a stick of some kind of processed cheese, and a squeezable container of something called Chicken Spread. Lourdes explained that since it was Sunday, the large neighborhood store was closed and she could not get any Spam. I would have to settle for Chicken Spread.

I was glad to see that this food would not go to waste even if I did not eat a great deal of it. Some small children came in and pleaded for sandwiches and Jessa prepared them some. The Chicken Spread was extremely sweet and tasted nothing like chicken and the children loved it and asked for more.

The children were presented to me formally and Lourdes explained that they wanted to give me a blessing. This is a custom in the Philippines. Children take the hand of adults and in a show of respect place the back of the hand against their forehead. I’d seen this quite often in the Philippines, but this was the first time it had happened to me. Later in the day, I stopped at a little shop to buy some instant coffee. A young boy showed up in the doorway and held out his hand. I instinctively took his hand and shook it. Then I heard a woman’s voice from inside the house saying that the little boy wanted to give me a blessing. I held out my hand again, and this time the little boy took it and touched it to his forehead. This made me reflect on the number of times that I had shaken the hand of little boys. I’m willing to bet now that those boys also wanted to give me a blessing and that by shaking their hands, I had made myself out to be quite the fool.

I’ll have to ask about this custom, because I’m not entirely sure if the children are giving the blessing or getting it. I’m fairly certain these women said that the children were giving me the blessing, but that doesn’t make much sense. It would make more sense for the adult to give the blessing to the children. The gesture also has a religious feeling to it. It feels like something that children would do to a priest, certainly not to a random foreigner like me.

I spent most of my time chatting with Lourde’s son, Jessa. His English was more up to the task and he was quite social and outgoing. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, I’d guess. He was dressed in a feminine fashion and from his haircut, I guessed that he often wore a woman’s wig. He told me that he worked part time at a radio station. He worked as part of a 3-person group doing a comedy show. There was a poster calendar from the radio station on the wall, and it showed Jessa in a dress with full make-up and a silver wig. He explained that he often went to town events dressed like that and was something of a public figure. He wasn’t paid for his work at the radio station, but he manages to work in a lot of free publicity for his beauty salon.

Lourdes had a couple of other children and it appeared that something of the showbiz bug ran through the family. Her daughter was a dancer and had worked for a couple of years as a dancer in Japan. I saw some photos from her time in Japan, and I saw that she was quite a pretty woman. Her dancing costumes were quite skimpy and it was clear that she was something of an exotic dancer. I asked Jessa if his sister had liked living in Japan. He said that she never went back after her contract was finished, so that said something. She was currently going to school in a nearby large town to complete high school and get her diploma. Then she is going to Italy. She will be going there on a student visa to study Italian, but plans to work while there.

Lourdes had one other son, and he was currently in Pattaya, Thailand. In the one picture I saw of him, he was also dressed rather like a woman and I got the impression that he worked in the bars in Pattaya in some fashion.

The family has its own rather large and powerful bangka. It has two engines and two propellers and Lourdes said that if I was interested, I could visit the island of Hononhom in their bangka. I would just have to pay the boatman 500 pesos and his helper 200 pesos for the day and cover the cost of gas. They wouldn’t charge me for the use of the boat. I was very interested in taking them up on this offer, but we never seemed able to come to grips with any practical details and plans. The offer was there, but somehow I couldn’t get our discussion to go any further than that and deal with when we could go and that sort of thing. It was hard to get it figured out, but it appeared that the boat was used from Monday to Saturday for fishing. So it would only be available on Sunday, and that would mean waiting for a week.

While we were chatting about this, the bangka showed up. It had been taken out by a couple of men for some Sunday fishing. There was an odd sort of platform for the bangka, and the boatman gunned the engine hard to propel the boat forward and raise it up onto this platform. It was a dangerous technique and the second man nearly had his head taken off by one of the outriggers. They had given the engine a bit too much gas and the boat was carried onto the platform and a bit past it, slamming into the house itself. No one reacted to this, so I guess it was business as usual.

As I mentioned earlier, the house was fairly established. It was more developed than I expected. The kitchen, despite being built on a somewhat rickety platform over the ocean, had running water and a propane stove. There were electric lights and quite a bit of room in the main part of the house. I asked about typhoons, and Lourdes said that the house had been completely destroyed a few times in the past. I believe she said that the last time was in 1998. A typhoon hit the coast here and the house was completely torn apart and washed away.

Not much else happened for the rest of the day. I got my hair cut and neatened up for 50 pesos at a little beauty salon across the street from my pension house. The man who cut my hair was reminiscent of Jessa, wearing women’s clothes and quite a bit of makeup. I also stopped by a large store and bought a small hand towel. I keep losing my towels and I find I need one to wipe the sweat away from my face when I’m cycling or even walking. I also dropped by a little electronics store. My memory cards are fast filling up, and I have to find a way to store my pictures. The cheapest way would be to buy a portable hard drive, but I have no confidence in them after so many of my previous ones breaking down. The next best would be to buy flash drives. They appear to be cheaper than memory cards. I can get a 32 gig flash drive even here in Guiuan for 1,100 pesos. That’s about 27 dollars. Not cheap, but perhaps the best way to go.

When the sun was lower in the sky at about 4:00, I went out with my camera again. I walked through the local streets and then down to the waterfront. I found another street like the Hollywood Jetty. This one was not as long, and it ended in a dock with a couple of fishing boats. I was a bit overwhelmed again with all the attention that I received. I was surprised when some people there already knew my name. And I ran across a man that I had met in a different part of the city the night before. I sat with him and we chatted for a while. Near us was a ramshackle little house – more of a shed than anything else. The man pointed out the woman that lived there with her children. He said that the house was a sign of poverty. It seemed odd, but he said that this woman made money as a pedicab driver. She would make just enough money to buy food each day and nothing more. I made some comment about how such a house must be in danger from typhoons. The man laughed and said that in fact the shack had lived through many typhoons and was still standing. The roof, of course, had blown off each time, but the walls remained. The casual way that this was said speaks volumes about the life of some of the local people. That the roof of your house simply blows away routinely in storms is just taken in its stride. As an odd counterpoint to this conversation, the man asked me how much my camera cost. I told him that it cost 1,000 dollars. This figure was called out to some nearby people and the fact that I had a thousand-dollar camera spread like wildfire through the neighborhood.

Throughout the day and in many of the conversations I had, people told me about all the places that I should visit. Pearl Island, for example, came up quite often. However, it was never clear how one actually visits these places. I find myself interested in going to Pearl Island but without any idea of how to get there or even where it is. I don’t have any kind of a useful map of the area. The plan for sometime today is to get on my bike and do a bit of exploring and see what roads lead where.

 

 

Tags: barangay, barangay captain, Hollywood Jetty, Japan, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, radio station, South Coast of Samar