Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

Had lunch today with family and relatives, c/o Auntie Pin who treated everyone at Max’s at Quezon Memorial Circle, QMC Park. I’ve been to the QMC park a few times earlier, and it’s a pretty good park, a project of former Quezon City vice-mayor Charito Planas. The QMC park boasts of being “self-reliant”, that is, sustaining itself without funding from local government. A very nice addition to the park that I saw was the Butterfly House (small, but people who run it seem to have a real passion for it) and the AANI Herbal Garden.

Lunch was okay and was the opportunity to meet a cousin and her family who arrived some two weeks ago from the US. They’re here to look into possibilities of importing their real estate business and to check out places for retirement. Since I haven’t seen them in 7 or 8 years, I was expecting to have a really wonderful time at the thought of a sort of “reunion.” Of course that didn’t really happen and what took place was simply the usual social rituals that we had with relatives. Well it was nice to see a couple of my aunties who also wanted to check out the ballroom dancing section of the park (the chief instructress was this 78-year old woman!!)

Anyway, being with relatives and cousins reminded me of why, as a young teenager, I never really enjoyed family reunions - there wasn’t really anybody to talk to. I simply could not relate to talk about business, money, careers, competition, success and numerous other things that came to me as sadly pretentious. In fact, what I do remember now was the feeling of dread that I had whenever there was a family reunion, the dreadful feeling of being pushed into the rat race.

My partner nearly got agitated again while talking to my cousin’s husband who is Filipino-American and was in the real estate business. While my partner and I shared the same values, he is more likely to speak out and assert his views whereas I am quite content with just being quiet, until, of course, something pokes at me.

Well, although lunch was a bit flat (except for a few nice things like seeing Ella, a few aunties, my 86-year old uncle), the afternoon walk around the QMC Park afterwards was really wonderful.

My partner and I first went to see the Butterfly House. Looking after the place was this rather chubby woman. She was mounting some butterflies and was happy to get a dead butterfly that we saw in the garden. She seemed very enthusiastic about her work. There was also a small butterfly museum, a piano, and some gold fish, a Japanese carp and a local variety of piranha the type that got no teeth!

Below is a photo of myself with Edward in the butterfly garden.

Below is a photo of my partner inspecting a black and white butterfly flying about.

Below are photos of butterflies, with the third photo showing an orange colored butterfly fluttering its wings near the flower of the lantana plant.

When we got out of the Butterfly House, we saw a cat with two kittens.

Walking around, our next destination was the herbal / garden / agriculture section of the park. On the way we passed by the Quezon Memorial Museum. I( had the feeling the museum had become smaller and that the “armory” was no longer there. It also did not provide a more objective (and much more socially useful) view of the complexities of the American colonial period.

Anyway, the herbal section of the park was really wonderful. We had coffee and sweet mango juice at the Kape Kalinga (my partner was so shocked that coffee cost only PHP10 a cup), then looked around. The bamboo huts that housed the various cafes, shops and learning centers were really nice. It was such a great sight as my partner and I thought about vernacular architecture and the possibilities we could do.

Then we passed by a hut that was doing work with mushrooms, and the fellow who ran the place asked us in. Ven Abalos managed a farmers multi-purpose cooperative in Pangasinan, and had a national radio program. It was fascinating talking to him, I was especially happy since my dad ran a cooperative (transport sector) before he died and so I was a bit familiar with cooperative work.

Ven had the vision of alternative livelihood and source of income for so many unemployed Filipinos through mushroom cultivation. He showed us a dark room in the hut where he grew the mushrooms - oyster mushrooms and gaderma mushrooms. I expected the room to be stuffy, and mouldy - but it wasn’t! Then Ven said that mushrooms was the future for the Filipino people. Funnily enough, I had the image in my mind of the aftermath of a nuclear war or a total collapse of the ozone layer, and all that could grow as food were mushrooms!

What a wonderful afternoon, especially my partner enjoyed talking to Ven. We also bought half a kilo of oyster mushrooms (they cost about PHP300 per kilo), and promised to come back.

We passed by a few other agri shops - bought some noodles made from pechay.

So, when we got home, dinner was crispy pechay noodles with shrimp, kangkong and mushroom sauce. I was afraid that I’d make a disaster of it but it was very good. The fresh mushrooms were very different from the ones bought in the supermarket or those in tins.

I’m so glad we went to QMC Park and that we stayed around. Auntie Eppie told me that my cousin’s little daughter would’ve wanted to go to the Butterfly House but the family had other gatherings to attend. When I told my partner about it he looked rather sad…

Well, we will surely be back to the QMC Park, especially now that there seem to be lots of more interesting things going on there.

But for some people, the Quezon Memorial Circle Park is utterly lacking in grandeur especially in our now so-called high-tech age. See these comments about the park. I truly truly hope that Planas and the people behind the Park do not submit to ways of thinking such as those …

EMail This Post This entry was posted by Fats on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 12:51 am and is filed under Takaw at Sursur!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.