Ms. Adventures

It has been told, politics make strange bedfellows. But over sushi midnight snacks, quasi-strangers make for odd pairs in the kitchen. That night (thanks to swigs of bitter alcohol), friends transformed took on animal-identities. They were meerkat, seacow, chicken(boy), cockroach and giraffe.

Collectively, with their paws, hairy feet, tail and beak as implements, they made a clumsy-looking sushi garden (see creations below) led by the rooster (the chicken insisted on its masculinity). The party of five did not stop with food experiments, though, and proceeded to have their future read by the wise card-literate giraffe, that did not get its hands dirty in the kitchen.

 

The highlights:

 Meerkat

Unlike the mystical feline that you’ve embodied, you will lead a less-than-extraordinary life. Your current quarter-life frustration—driving, is a skill which you will only acquire when a male asks you to. Despite your sometime catty behavior, you will have boyfriend number three—he is a rough-and-tumble cool cat. You won’t end up with him though, as you’ll marry a cat wearing straps on your first date. Your current job is a lifelong affair, which, contrary to popular belief, will not make you rich. You will pass a difficult career test, with difficulty. Naturally.

 

Number of kitten/s: 1

Age when you will enter into a special contract with your mate: 32-25 years old

 


Seacow

Wikipedia claims that you will have a lifespan similar to a human being, and can age up to 70 years of age. The cards say so, too. You will have a beach life, or in human language, a life anchored on financial stability. Despite being in a siren position at the seaside for most of the day, it will take you a year or two to mate with another locally-bred Dugong.

 

Number of calves: 3




 

Rooster

Despite being a good luck charm to some Asians, you will have no luck in raffle promos. You will wake up at the crack of dawn to work as a regular worker bee, after your first failing attempt to get a job. It is likely that you will end with somebody rich, with whom you will have marital cockfights with (read: love-hate relationship). It is also highly probable that you may keep your old flame, when the latter permits so. Duh.

 

Average lifespan: 50-60

Number of chicks: 3

 Cockroach

You’ve lived up to your name and pestered the giraffe with very specific questions. What you expect on July 14, 2014 will happen a month earlier. You will fly to Japan on a February. It will be a troublesome 2010 for you, but the consolation is (if there’s any) that you’ll end up with a plump mate (born on a September) which you will not impregnate before marital rites. This Christmas, you’ll receive the unexpected. And despite your sojourn abroad, you will live somewhere in Cebu City.


Thanks to the hopefully inaccurate Giraffe:




 

School is cool, but checking out the toilets while globe-trotting is an enviable habit.

What makes it better, is finding the time to write about it in online travel logs because she has uprooted her desk to different parts of the world. The farthest I’ve gone this week is a 15-minute drop-in at the mall which took me an hour to get to with the midday traffic.

You see, I’ve been a frustrated traveler lately. I’ve cancelled two non-refundable flights which have cost me surges in the credit card bill.

But talk and blogs are cheap, so for the remainder of my sem break, I should be content in making mental escapes.

A recent sojourn is this entertaining piece by Mom (my mother’s sister), a forty-something trial court judge whose office has a serene view of the Southern Cebu beach. When not in lawyer’s robes, she mothers a full house, cooks full meals, gobbles gourmet cheese with her brother’s stock of good wine (conveniently her neighbor) and plots her next vacay.  

 

The writer and sometime toilet-inspector, in KSA and in Muslim-appropriate clothes. =)

***

Toilets around the world are interesting to study. In my travels, I have seen how toilets vary widely in design and in how they are used. There are toilets that are modern, beautiful, spic and span and well-provided with soap, paper towels and toilet paper. There are also toilets that are filthy and with bad smell that I am afraid to make contact with any surface for fear of catching germs and viruses.

 

During a four-hour layover at Incheon International Airport in Seoul, Korea, I went to the airport’s toilets or restrooms or comfort rooms as Pinoy’s like to call them. I was totally amazed and taken aback with what I saw. The restrooms were astoundingly clean, tidy and use state-of-an-art technology. It was so clean that I told myself that I could eat and sleep right there. I went inside in one of the cubicles and saw several buttons. I tried pressing one button and heard the machine working, and the plastic cover for the toilet seat went round and change to a new plastic cover. Then there are other buttons with “soft”, “strong”, “shower” printed on it. Curious what these buttons were for, I pushed one and I almost got wet, hahaha… It was a button for the water spout to clean your bottoms when you have finished doing your private business. The water comes in soft, strong or in shower mode. There was a button labeled “etiquette bell” and wondering what it was, I pressed it. Lo and behold, there was music coming out from the box. I was told later that this bell is used to muffle any embarrassing sound while one is inside the cubicle. On my flight back to Cebu from Los Angeles, I had a stop-over in Incheon Airport again and I eagerly visited their ultra-modern “wonder-toilets”. Hahaha…

 

I also had a stop-over in Narita Airport in Japan and the toilets were also equally neat and clean. The cubicles though smaller in size than what I have used in the USA were also equipped with comfortable flip down seats and were laden with a good supply of soap, toilet paper and paper towels. But most signs in the toilet were in Japanese characters.

Flying from the Philippines to Los Angeles, to New Jersey, to Riyadh, to Jeddah, to Hong Kong… had given me hours and hours of being inside airplanes. I had no choice but to use the airplane’s compact toilets. These are design wonders which fit in a very small space. Airplane’s toilet has a seat and a startling loud sonic swoosh when you flush. Though compact, it is amply provided with hand soap, lotion, cologne, paper towels, sanitary napkins, etc. However, anyone wanting to use the plane’s toilet should have a perfect timing in going in so as not to be trapped when there is air turbulence.

 

When I visited Saudi Arabia, it was an exposure to me in using squatting toilets. These are basically a hole in the floor but equipped with a flush and a bidet or some call it “anal dozer “ to clean your bottoms. I used these toilets while wearing an abaya (long black flowing robe) with long pants underneath and oh my gosh… it took much of my gymnastics skills to gather everything safely so I won’t mess my clothes. After trying a few times, I think I have mastered the art, hehehe…

 

 

The thing about bidet is another story. It comes very convenient and handy in cleaning your bottoms and keeps you from using much toilet paper. This is an environmental-friendly small apparatus which I have also adapted in the house. When my hubby first came home from Jeddah in 2005, he told me to install a bidet in our toilet in a house we finally owned in Lapu-lapu City. We were using a bidet in our house in Bacolod City some years back but forgot about it when we transferred to Cebu City and had to transfer from one apartment to another. Now, that we have our own house, the bidet is a main fixture in our toilet. My three kids are used to having a bidet that they do not like going to public toilets where the bidet is non-existent.

There will be more stories about toilets as I continue to dream and plan for more travels in the future.

Milenyo, Frank and this year, it’s Ondoy.

September storms have always sent our crew to relief campaign.

For those in the better position, please make it a habit to help.

 

While we thank everyone for flooding our broadcast complex with cash donations, we encourage that all donated money be forwarded to our centralized account for better efficiency:

SAGIP KAPAMILYA BDO ACCOUNT NUMBER

5630020111 ABS CBN FOUNDATION INC.

 Also the victims are still in dire need of the following sort of items:

MEDICINE FOR COUGH AND COLDS

UNDERWEAR

PLASTICWARE

TETANUS TOXOID

CLOTHES

SLIPPERS

RICE

CANNED GOODS

SOAP & WATER

 

Where to drop them off? We have over FIFTY centers, these are just some of them.

 

SAGIP KAPAMILYA DROP-OFF POINTS:

 ABS-CBN COMPLEX, JAGOBIAO

UV MAIN CAMPUS, COLON FUENTE OSMENA

MANDAUE CITY HALL PLAZA

LAPULAPU CITY HALL

TALISAY CITY HALL & GAISANO GRAND

FIESTA MALL

BARANGAY HALLS IN APAS, PARDO, TISA & BASAK PARDO

WOW TRAVEL & MORE IN ROBINSON'S

GAISANO MACTAN & IN FRONT OF BIRHEN

SA REGLA PARISH

LILOAN KAI COMPLEX

PARKMALL

STI MANDAUE

GOTHONG SOUTHERN SHIPPING, PIER 4

NGO'S:  FORGE (4126328); CPAG

(2543572); & KAABAG SA SUGBO (2541878)

JULIE'S BAKESHOP OUTLETS

LABANGON BRGY. HALL

SOUTH BUS TERMINAL

 

Daghang Salamat!

 

 

It’s a national holiday but I’m ploughing through the week’s worth of work just like any given Monday. And while this day will not go without my methodical grunts, impatient foot tapping, gross nail biting—I’m glad to be in good working condition.

It’s September and in this side of the holiday-fed nation, it’s beginning to look a lot

like Christmas.

Nanay sparked the holiday buzz by bunching small girly purchases she couldn’t resist from the three consecutive payday weekend sales. Last Saturday, she woke up bright and early for what I thought were domestic duties. Instead two hours and four long phone calls after, a

titanium silver ref was delivered. I sense holiday feasts on their way.

Elsewhere, away from the kitchen, I am rooted in another corner of the house. Where I chase deadlines and catch up with readings without being removed from the seat. The makeshift study is built on a country wooden desk. But with a

restless owner who labors here from three to four hours a day—stuffed creatures and other creations have now camped out in the thicket of books. I have for company: a wallpapered sun, study lamps, other knickknacks and old music.

 

This is why I don’t dread work-work or schoolwork. Even on holidays.

 

 

   

Funny, how a strapping deadline can free the typing hand that has long withdrawn from familiar territory.

I know. I have made it clear, filled it in my neon-colored post-its, whined about it over below-zero degrees chilled beer, there is no free time to be had, in between this tug-of-war of money-making schemes and now, index-finger-tall reading commitments.

I can’t catch sunrises, or if I’d miss them as much as I have, I wish it were for the reason that I had irresponsibly slept in. But that’s not me. I wake up before the crack of dawn like a good soldier, unconditionally—through puffy eyes from last night’s fight, long work days, late school nights, whatever.

Since a long bubble bath is not five minutes away, a brash shower wakes me up from slur pace. But I love life, and how like a good book, it gets better and better with each passing page, or hour. All in a day’s work, I get to shake hands with princes and paupers, transform from lounge pants to fussy dresses, switch tongues like a dual native, write about fashion and legal precepts (in separate windows, of course) and how after five, I sit content, my child-like attention span growing with each lesson.

And even if it rains hard, I am warmed by coming home to a hot meal, thick bed, and yes, not less than ten invitations from strangers on social networks.

 
Haha. Whoosh, there goes another deadline.  

YELLOW REVOLUTION
By Kara Mae Muga Noveda
(as printed in Sun.Star Zup section, Aug. 10, 2009)

I was days old when the Missis of a national hero became the first female president in Asia. Cory to me belonged to a golden, however distant past—the decade of shoulder pads and big glasses, grainy documentaries and poignantly, just a three-paragraph mention in my history textbook. She, of the landed gentry’s family, appealed less to me when I grew up to be a student journalist who sat down with Hacienda Luisita farmers who had to get by with less than twenty pesos daily wages. I also learned of the bloody coups, an aftermath of the same peaceful revolution that brought her to power.

Even her favorite daughter agrees. Her mother was far from perfect. She was no saint, but this did not make her less of a hero. In my generation, the “contemporary” Cory we knew was popular for less historic contributions: the mother of headline-hugging celebrity Kris Aquino, EDSA II supporter (which we later would find out produced another unpopular president), but ultimately, a steady calm voice in national dissonance.

When I met her, she did not glow from the reflected glory of the 1986 People Power which stapled her as an icon. Yes, she wore a yellow dress, but like her simple dress, her ordinariness gleaned through. She had no entourage, only one assistant, whom she introduced later to me as a friend. When I asked her on-the-spot for an interview, she immediately obliged with a toothy smile. Since my cameraman had to fix his equipment first, I spent ten minutes in the ABS-CBN lobby, waiting with her. If you had ten minutes with a former president, one supposes you’d have a big talk. But she did not gab like a consummate politician. Instead, she spent the next ten minutes talking with me about the nice weather, Kris, and Jun Lozada.

In testimonies, I came to know that this was a “very Cory” thing to do. She found time to do thoughtful gestures, like come unannounced in Barangay Luz to check on her micro-finance beneficiaries, open the car window to shake the hand of a supporter who chased her outside the Carmelite monastery and give her paintings to strangers. And from the pages of our modern history, she leaps to us as the ordinary housewife who accomplished the extraordinary by choosing to do the right thing, even after her husband’s assassination and even when she had the option to live well in the shelter of her family’s wealth. Before being immortalized in stone and currencies, heroes make history by doing the right thing at a time of reckoning.

Death peppered with bullets sent his husband to a heroic status; her silent passing away in the hospital deathbed had us down with yellow fever, once more. In this 2009-style yellow revolution—we relish the democracy she helped restore—we uploaded yellow ribbons, blogged and twittered away the patriotic sentiments she stirred unto us with her passing. In life and even in peaceful death, the sometime math teacher has taught us another important lesson in history, that is, never to forget others and this country.