My travels to places where there are no paths to follow.
I’ve been eating lugaw (aka rice porridge, aka congee) all my life.
I started at home, associating lugaw with the usual spells of childhood flu, as standard bedside comfort food offered by my worried mother. Hence evolved my lifelong love affair with proletarian lugaw bangketa, savored with satisfaction in working-class districts and poor people’s markets, especially after I became a full-time activist in the early 1970s. Continue reading “The lugaw stall with no name”
Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, bisikleta ang kailangan.—Ariel Ureta, popular radio-TV host in the 1970s
Ariel Ureta, forever associated with this motto under martial law, probably meant it as a harmless play or at most a subtle dig on the Marcos propaganda slogan, “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan.” Rumors flew that Ariel was later called to Camp Crame and given a mild dose of Marcosian discipline by being made to bike around the camp for hours—a mere urban legend, as he himself recently clarified. Continue reading “Working-class heroes, of the biker kind”
I have this lifetime obsession with boats.
I secretly spend a huge amount of time reading and writing about watercraft of all types. I enthusiastically ride them every chance I get—from the rakit (pontoon barge) of many Abra River crossings in my childhood and youth, to the modern inter-island passenger ships that ply the southern islands from the Port of Manila, which I’d usually choose over airplane rides.