Fruits

The other day I bought mangos, an avocado (but too watery), an orange and an apple. I also bought a small bunch of little bananas, but it didn’t take long for the ants to smell them and form a bustling highway. Aside from Cebu having the best mangos in the world that I get to eat every day (“the best” means sweet; small seed, therefore more flesh; and rarely any teeth-catching fibres), my favourite fruit here is called mangosteen. The only thing it has in common with mango is its delightfulness. On the outside it looks like a smooth purple passion fruit, but the inside is more like lanzone (another fruit I only discovered since coming here that looks a little like a baby potato on the outside). Gosh, this is difficult to describe… You break the tough, purple skin to find the sweetest citrus-shaped pieces of pale, white flesh inside. Inside some of the pieces are seeds, but often many of the pieces are seed-free and you can just squish the whole, sweet thing in your mouth without having to eat around anything. Really, I’m not doing the mangosteen any justice here.

There’s also a fruit called rambutan, red furry things that also taste very sweet, although the white flesh inside is difficult to get off the seed. As with mangosteen and lanzone you break the skin open, but inside rambutan you find what looks like a single, translucent tapioca pearl inside. It’s sweeter than a lychee but that’s the only other fruit I can think of to compare it to. I think it’s a very pretty fruit.

Next time you’re in a Chinatown somewhere and see some strange-looking fruits, just ask for mangosteen, rambutan and lanzone (pronounced lan-zone-eh, but the “eh” is pronounced like the spanish/italian “e” vowel and not like the Canadian “eh” we’re so famous for). Try them all. They’re very lami (delicious in Cebuano).

Uncle George Wants You

The pull/push to other countries is strong here. I’ve read that about 10% of the Filipino population lives abroad and that those people fuel a huge part of the national economy with the money they send back to their families. It is said that if that income is ever severed the economy would collapse.

Many people I’ve met here are waiting for their papers to come through to go to Canada or the US. How long they’ll have to wait no one seems to know. There are many schools here that train people to become caregivers in only a few months, and then help the graduates to go through the process of getting their papers to work in North America (although I’ve heard that unfortunately many of these “colleges” are money-grabbing hoaxes preying on dreams and desperation).

Nursing students, in their pink-shirted uniforms, are everywhere in my neighbourhood. Nursing students wear pink and medical students wear white, and all of the shirts button at the back. How do they get dressed in the morning? Well, it's rare for anyone to live alone here, so I imagine there’s someone there to help them get in and out of their uniforms everyday. (Well that was a random aside...)

The funny thing about the photo above (taken in downtown Cebu City) is that I didn’t notice the enourmous George Bush image hovering overhead, seeking nurses, care-givers and IT professionals; I only saw his looming face once I looked at the photo on my computer. I don’t have any philosophical waxing to come up with about that, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Maybe I’m just too used to seeing his face; I do get CNN on my television after all.

Carbon Market

Cebu City’s frenzied Carbon Market and many of its residential neighbourhoods share something in common: behind the initial street façade lies an enormous maze of informal settlement, stretching all the way to the façade on the other side, filling blocks like chaotic honeycomb. Penetrating Carbon’s exterior by slipping into one of its many alleys is like opening a gift that is wrapped in a thousand layers of curious faces, live roosters, sparkling dried fish, improbable videoke, baby Jesus statues and every colour in the world set against a backdrop of grey. It is an exciting and overwhelming, cheek-to-jowl place. In that way it is like many of the neighbourhoods that make up this city; you don’t know they’re there until you slip in and subtly discover the labyrinth.

more photos:

Ode to Instant Noodles

There you are in the cup I see
Swimming in your broth
No MSG to afflict me
Hidden deep beneath your froth

The Colombian didn’t believe in you
He said you’re just so cheap
But he didn’t need you as I do
His nasty criticisms ran deep

But here today I shlurp you up
I’ve got no energy to cook a pot
You’re easy made inside your cup
When sick, chicken soup is better bought