It's the end of my second week in
Baguio, third week in the Philippines, and first week of actual
teaching. I'm starting to feel at home here. I have now mastered two
different jeepney routes, the Guisad route--which will take me to the
mall, restaurants, bars, and basements filled with second hand
clothes, and the Trinidad route, which I learned because I played the
violin for a church in Trinidad which was welcoming Bishop Pacao of
the Diocese of the North Central Philippines this Sunday. I found the
nearby grocery store, and the other day I corrected an elementary
student who called me David, “that's Sir David”.
I think of the relationship between
Trinidad and Baguio as similar to that between Queens and New York,
they definitely are different entities, but not entirely distinct.
Also Trinidad seems a little bit more suburban, bordering on rural.
Perhaps it's not a good metaphor, but hopefully you get the picture,
for clarity's sake I'm going to abandon it.
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| Trinidad |
By the way, full disclosure, I may
make it sound like riding jeepney's is very difficult, but it really
isn't. The places they're going is written on the side, and you only
need to know two words, “palah” (spelling aproximate) which is
stop, and “bayat po” which you say when you give the driver your
8 pesos (okay it's three words, “po” is just an honorific though)
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| A Jeepney leaving the Military School |
You remember I mentioned Fray the
driver, who drove me out of Manila and up to Baguio in the middle of
Typhoon Mario. Well mostly he works in Manila, but his family is
based in Trinidad, and here in Baguio his wife has been a good
friend, driving me around after church on Sundays and showing me the
sights of Baguio, while instructing me in how to get around and where
to find the things I need. Today she showed me around Trinidad, the
strawberry market which borders on the strawberry farms, the
vegetable market, and Benguet University. I cannot tell you how glad
I was to see the vegetable market, I never realized how much I liked
fresh vegetables until I thought I was going to have to go without
them for a year. The vegetable market is an enormous tent where
farmers from up north sell their produce and grocers and and
restauranteurs from Manila buy giant bushels of it. Luckily you can
also pick up vegetables in as small an amount as a kilo. At this
time of year the strawberry market is mostly souvenir stands and
overpriced preserves, but apparently during strawberry season it is a
major tourist attraction.
As my title suggests, I've been
finding as I've gotten used to this place that many things are
basically the same, but there is usually some twist to remind me that
I'm not in Kansas anymore. For example, the church choir I played
with is exactly like choirs at home, filled with sweetly indomitable
mothers who will simply not believe that a skinny young man is full
after only one serving. The difference is in the food they keep
heaping on my plate at the church luncheon: liver, goat, great piles
of rice, and some strangely chewy type of meat. I ask what it is,
“uncooked!” shouts someone, I laugh, nope, not a joke, it really
is intentionally undercooked goat meat, cooked enough to take the
sauce, but not enough to ruin that texture. By the way, everything is
delicious, I only regret asking a little bit. Another example is the
entertainment of the church lunch, the Sunday school shyly sings a
song, a group of youth giggle their way through a song and dance,
there is a raffle to raise funds for the church; the first prize? A
goat (second prize was a chicken).
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| Fiesta! |
You can find most of your fast food
cravings here in Baguio: McDonalds, KFC, and some Philippine specific
fast food like Jollibee which is a fried chicken place. But of course
all of these places serve their food with a bunch of rice. And the
restaurants, it seems to me, are significantly cleaner.
The biggest culture shock for me still
has more to do with which end of the classroom I'm standing on than
which side of the globe. The other day there were some kids shouting
in the hall while I was talking to the class. I asked someone to shut
the door and by golly a kid jumped up and did it! Maybe that doesn't
seem like such a big deal, but remember I'm still getting used to the
sensations of power. And then there's the feeling of shushing a crowd
of kids and listening to the sound of momentary silence (until the
whispering comes back like waves on the shore). I have my own
classroom now, with a desk and everything, though I won't be teaching
in there until the next grading period starts. I have a desk in the
faculty room as well, where I get to participate in all that secret
backroom voodoo that we speculated about as kids (mostly I read my
textbook, comb my hair and go on facebook). Sometimes kids knock on
the door and say “permission to enter teachers?” I cannot
overemphasize how tickled I am by this.
Did I mention that I taught a class
last week on the 20th century in music? “oooh” I
think, “Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg!” nope, not that twentieth
century. Gather round children, today we're talking about Led
Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Disco. (at one point in class I used the
phrase “whatever it is you kids are listening to these days”).
Which brings me to the final bullet in
my journal, what do these kids listen to? Well the first rule I've
learned is that no matter where you go in the world, you can't escape
Top 40 American pop music. But what else? Maybe Korean pop, or J-pop?
Or some native Igarot folk songs? Nope, the predominant music you
hear from live music bars and people's porches all over Baguio is
good ol country music. Kenny Rodgers is a special favorite. So
there's a kick in the pants for all my snobby New Yorkers, on the
other side of the world people are still singing God Bless Texas.
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