Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

The fiesta went quite well this weekend - really noisy - and someone organized some parlor games for young people along our street. It was sunny all day and a group of gay performers visiting from Cavite entertained with their dances and fire-eating stunts. They came in via a jeepney hired for about 1,700 pesos for a few days, according to their hired driver, to join fiestas in Parañaque, Manila and then ours. I asked the driver if he owned the jeepney, he said no, and pointed to the old woman sitting inside it, he told me, she owns the jeepney. He added that he was just the driver. I asked him if they’ve been here before, he said no. So I thought that the routine must be quite popular (impressive drumming and some 5 or 6 gays in ati-atihan -style or other costume (last year I think it was safari) and one or two of them very skilled in fire-eating.

They are extremely talented, certainly much better than the amateurs around here who beat drums and jump up and down. There have been plenty of very impressive drumming recently though, so I guess people have been practising more.

Anyway, the jeepney driver asked if Trevor was my husband and I said yes. I asked if lots of women in his town marry foreigners and he said, yes, there has been a growing number of women marrying foreigners. So I asked how the relationships were and he said not very well. I asked why. His explanation was quite poetic, I thought,

“May kama ka na, hindi ka pa nakuntento. Ngayon ay nasa banig ka na lang, di lang banig, sementong malamig pa.”

He said, describing the women, You were given a bed and you are not content, now you only have a mat, worse you have a cold ground to sleep on.

The women, he said, also fooled around a great deal.

He asked if Trevor was a good husband. I said yes, and I described to him how we live. He seemed pleased that we live rather simply and are happy. When I mentioned that Trevor was already retired and not working he said, “alagain na lang”, that is, just someone who needs caring. I thought he meant it negatively but he added that it was good because he is my husband, and couples look after each other.

I realized that “alagain” had a more positive connotation to some people especially when it referred to family looking after each other. Or perhaps I confused it with “palamunin” which meant a mouth to feed, which can have a negative connotation especially when referring to lazy young able-bodied men in the family, but has a more jocular connotation when referring to younger people or people who have just lost their jobs and still live with their parents.

Actually, I was about to ask the driver and gay dancers if they would wish to perform at the church (just a few more yards from where they parked the jeepney) in order to attract more people and earn more money, when I realized that the church here (which can be quite conservative) would consider these things blasphemous. I guess the same with the kids playing games with long eggplants hanging between their legs, which Trevor saw on his way back to our apartment.

When the religious procession began in the evening it started to rain.

Today we celebrated lunch at a nearby restaurant with Auntie Pin and family - it’s auntie’s 80th birthday. Plenty of food, we even had some for take-out! Below is a photo of Edward after eating…

And below I took a photo of the pond surrounding the restaurant - plenty of fish - and coins!

Anyway, all day that Sunday fiesta I’ve been thinking of that gay performance group. They work really hard and I can imagine invest a lot in their skills, costumes, make-up. I wondered if they earned enough through their fiesta-hopping and if they encountered aggressive towns… It would’ve been nice to chat with them but they all had to go and work …

I also thought about those women, especially in small towns, who had unsuccessful relationships with foreign men. It must’ve been quite a disaster for the men too. Actually, Trevor and I met an Australian woman at an airport in Thailand who said her ex-husband has married twice, all to Filipina women who just took money from him and dumped him - and that he was doing it all again. She thought that he was really stupid.

Then I thought about a few Filipina friends of mine, women intellectuals, who have just married foreign men and are very happy. So it also seems that quite a number of young intelligent Filipina women are now marrying foreign men (not Americans!), not for purely economic reasons but more for intellectual reasons. Well, not intending to put down Filipino men but it does seem that the local intellectual-cultural machismo landscape (at least in the city centers) has degenerated…

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