Fruit trees and others.

i'm still not very over about photo posts, but this may be the last one since it would take time before i could finish the 36 shots of the film i loaded in my camera. I have turned meticulous in choosing when and what to photograph since i've had that camera. as a result, i became more relax and stopped crying over spilled milk. or maybe i still haven't found and lost a shot that i so badly wanted to get. 

last weekend i chatted with a friend over her not getting the kind of wedding picture package that she wanted. to which, i suggested she filed an official complaint, which she did not want to and had no plans of doing. that was so me, and it was so her. my conclusion and recommendations was that pictures that never were captured are not meant to be captured. and that if they are special enough, they should deserve a space in our memories. I don't think she fully understood what i meant especially that she belongs to a group that are so enamored by wedding photos and wedding celebrations and telling everyone you have a wedding, while i belong to those that prefer to keep our vows and important moments private. 

(AND, I think that that this mulling over requires a separate post but just to tell you--that's what i meant by not crying over spilled milk. the shots are forever lost, move on--or marry your wedding album, instead.) 

the following are the plants in my parents' house that i took pictures of. just for posterity.

cacao. chocolates are made of these. They belong to the family STERCULIACEAE.
(Theobroma cacao). 

and the tree. cocao tree.

baston ni san hosep (literally, cane of st. joseph) from the Family Agavaceae.

(Cordyline fructicosa (L.) A. Cheval.)
(Taetsia fructicosa (L.) Merr.)
A good profile of this is found in this PDF file.

native santan. the kind that grows tall.
(Ixora coccinea)

MISnamed to be morning glory.

if you may tell me the name of this?

organic tomatoes not ripe for picking. the key to having good tomatoes is to pick them when they're mature enough. the one they sell at the supermarket are picked way before the proper time so they easily spoil. after having tasted organic, sun-ripe tomatoes, i never want to buy tomatoes from the supermarket again.
Lycopersicon esculentum--the general scientific name. i have no idea what the variety of the tomatoes in our backyard is.

chili plant. Organic also. we use the leaves to cook (native) chicken tinola. I never learned to cook chicken tinola properly having been pesco-lacto-vegetarian for a long time but i use them to cook the nylon shells with. they make a difference in the taste, compared to those without chili leaves.  

chilis. in Hiligaynon: KUTITOT. in Karay-a: katumbal. in Tagalog: Siling Labuyo.
in english: Cayenne, from this site.
(Capsicum frutescens)
FIlipinos usually preserve it with vinegar to make the vinegar spicier. That concoction we call SINAMAK.
i'm not a fan of sinamak since my tolerance for things spicy is vey very low. 

male papaya flower. slightly different infloresence from that of the female papaya. long penducles.

male papaya plant.
(Carica papaya)

female papaya flower. solo flight all the time. sticks close to the trunk. short penduncles.

female papaya tree.

"A male papaya is distinguished by the smaller flowers borne on long stalks. Female flowers of papaya are pear shaped when unopened, and distinguished from bisexual flowers which are cylindrical." 
From this Papaya site.
Our backyard did not have a bisexual papaya, unfortunately.

local basil we call "kalu-oy". From family Lamiaceae.
Ocimum basilicum
english: sweet basil
although i remain unsure because this BALANOY looks italian basil to me.

laurel plant. where you get your bay leaf.
we commonly call it REKADO. or LAUREL.
(Laurus nobilis) From the family Lauraceae.

bay leaf.

organic jackfruit.
Artocarpus heterophyllus or A. heterophyll
From the family Moraceae.
LANGKA is what we call a person exhibiting unbearable dumbness.

kaffir lime plant. Cabuyao?
(Citrus hystrix)
this plant is an import. i haven't seen anybody in our town growing this.
which is true because nobody in town cooks using this plant (leaves or fruit).

chico buds and flower.
Achras sapota Linn.


FIN.

market , market.

.It's a "long weekend" because of the Catholic holiday. 

(Long weekend meaning, a holiday date conveniently set on a monday or a friday of the week making the no-work weekend 3 days or so.)

The whole family went along with the mother superior to the market. There's a town next to ours  whose market day s falls on a saturday. 

This is what we found:

stalls along facing the street. the market was developed in such a way that permanent stalls are located outside, like a fortress to the open air-market inside which on non-market days serve as, simply, courtyards.

Itinerant vendors selling children's dresses. they set their wares along the pedestrian walkways.  

things rubber. The one with wooden handle is a rubber slingshot. 

handmade baskets made of bamboo.

mobile jewelry vendors. most are silver-plated. My grandmother once bought me a "fancy" earring from one of these vendors. my earlobe scarred and got infected by the "fancy" chemicals they used for gold-plating. I started hating jewelries after that. 

more itinerant wares.

local potters selling cooking wares made from clay.

clay pots. people in rural areas still use them, i guess. green living. Now we just use them to store salt.

meat vendors at the meat section. the cows and pigs are usually slaughtered the night before. 

Courtyard vending.

neice and sister. they came to buy the cooking clay wares. when we were young we used to role play using the clay pots. we cooked with real vegetables and real fire and used the kiddie sized claywares. that's how we made friends with kids in the neighborhood.

nails.

ukay ukay stalls. 

batchoy store. 

batchoy store and the vinyls on the wall.

hello, xanadu vinyl!

and a sign you will never find in any established city restaurants.

batchoy eaters.

FIN.

The GMOA Experience

Four days into our hibernation keith and i left our comfort zone for the provincial capital for a change of scenery. Also because we didn't have any cash left and only the capital has all the banks, thus the mid-day (ad)venture. Oh, it's the first time we deliberately went to the capital! clap clap clap!


The capital has a new mall, they call it G-MOA, or more completely, Gaisano Mall of Antique. the MOA acronym was already made popular by the SM conglomerate when they built the atrociously huge gas guzzling building called Mall of Asia, MOA for short (but i still couldn't get the hang of it. I haven't been there and if people tell me they went to MOA there would be a blank "huh?" from my end and that storyteller would be forced to drop the more popular name "SM" then my face would light up.)


So Gaisano hitched a ride with MOA and called theirs G-MOA. yea, it's gonna be a hit to the brown skinned white trash.


I am just appalled at how these moneymakers underestimate our intellect. It's almost the same thing with the supposed-to-be-indie movie Sigwa, but that's a different topic (which i might be driven enough to rant about someday, yeah, when it's already stale).


Frankly, I didn't expect much from the building because Gaisano is well-known for their kabaduyan, anyway. However, i did hope they will spare my province from their disease, and apparently they didn't. The noise inside was just unbearable. The music from the cheap speakers were so loud and the PA system so bad it's like being in a nightmarish rock fest. 


Our kid, on the other hand, remained excited despite these little discomforts. Brown skinned and probinsiya as we are, Gaisano decided to cheapen us some more by not putting airconditioning at some parts of the mall. For one, the lobby of the supermarket was so humid. The smell and air was so bad Keith said it's designed to make you sick.


(a really bad segway coming) 
That's the good thing -- probably the best -- about being a kid. you're completely oblivious to the ugliness of the world, or gad, the GMOA, until you learn about good design, art, or cultural sensitivity. Education and knowledge is a double-edged sword that you have to learn to use properly. I think that's what university/college is for, provided of course, that you have educated professors.
(end of the bad segway) 


Unable to arrest the kid's hyperactivity we brought him to Mr. Donuts. I half-expect there would be local food stores other than Mang Inasal, Jollibee and Greenwich because we already have a of surplus of those in the City. Their junk is the last thing i'd like eat while i'm here. But none in GMOA, except for a couple that serve lunch fare, and we were too full for lunch. So coffee and donuts is it.


Anyhow, the kid wanted to order all the colorful donuts but i set the limit to only three and he ate everything like he just ordered 1 sungak-sungak meal, dine in, mind you, not talabunan*. not even to go.


"Why is it so noisy in here?" I said to his father. 


Christ. the store has its own pipe-in music and at that certain moment they were playing the baylehan dance music. The PA outside was gurgling announcements, competing with the stylized versions of christmas songs--the mall's own piped-in music. It's just noisy. noisy. noisy.


Gaisano, not all brown skinned white trash enjoy everything baylehan**. so please. we are all not without taste. 


And because we're just grocery shopping junkies, never department/boutique shopping junkies we capped our small tour by checking out the supermarket section. It lacked airconditioning although Keith said he liked that they are selling big cans of Baguio oil.***


"It's what our favorite supermarket lacks, i think."

"Yeah. But they don't have the Oishi potato chips. And the rest is just bad." 
(That comment can't be trusted because i don't live here anymore. and seriously, i can spend an entire month at home without having the need to go to a supermarket. really.)


"They also don't have tortillos." 


I did notice a lot of goods you'd get from the sari-sari store are missing from the shelf. For one, the junk food section looked like it just survived a season of panic-buying because there were a number of sections without display. 


I paid for the purchases and we decided to just head home. The noise sucked all the energy out of me.


"So that must be the reason for putting these junk food stores near the entrance. It's the only thing that's really "good" here. It's like candy from a pedophile." (Shit, i don;t know why i even thought of that analogy.)


Keith enjoyed it; he never had any of it being a city kid. The kid, too, he enjoyed the shebang, because kids are always happy until we tell them to stop being so. I was disappointed because really, I thought we were more than that.


But hell, this is Gaisano! (insert Gaisano jingle here)




--------


And here is the part that explains all those asterisks. 


*mah friends and i (which one, i can;t remember. Bobong, maybe) had this brilliant idea that instead of naming our combo meals 1-2-3 or merienda or kiddie or some over-used words we'll call it with local terms like "sungak-sungak" (a really big meal good enough to feed a giant), "talabunan" (meaning if you can't finish a meal, you may opt to borrow a "tabon" (cover) and come back for it later -- gross but funny), "2-days nagutman meal" (a meal good for somebody who have not eaten for two days, and you may opt to have it "talabunan", too!)


**not to diss "baylehan" as a culture or history. "baylehan" through times has evolved into something with negative connotation. but i have to do more in-depth research to be able to explain that. i don't have anything against this as i practically grew up going to these, if not watching these from our house second floor window.

***Incidentally, we're, like, fans of buying-things-in-big-packages because it's more economical and environment friendly that way. Oil for one, we usually buy it in 2-liter packages because i for one, believe that we waste a lot of the expensive cooking oil buying it in its iced-candy package. 

FIN.

Ghosts of Childhood

(featuring the flowers of Antique, Philippines)


August 30 was a National Heroes' Day, therefore a national holiday. On August 27, my family left our house in the city for a long-weekend at my parents' place in Antique. Borrowing my father's digital point-and-shoot, i went around taking macro shots of the common weeds, flowers, trees -- plants! -- found in our residential lot and in our farm land across the river. 

My knowledge in basic biology came handy.

I wish though i knew how to take landscape photographs but the point and shoot is limiting and much as i wanted to, the stitched panorama i took were not what i wanted. 

On the bus on the way home, I told Keith of the my dream shots. this part requires a separate post. So here...now...are the plants of Antique in their boldest form:

Unidentified ornamental plant.

Unidentified but very common weed. 

Young corn with blazing hair.

si-o si-o. Thought to be the chinese lantern (Physalis alkekengi) plant but most chinese lantern plants i saw were red. this barely gets orange when ripe. or maybe it depends on the variety?  

  

unidentified grass

baho baho (tagalog: lantana; kantutay) (english: coronitas) (Lantana camara L.)

squash -- the fruit -- field. and beyond that, the Sibalom River.

String beans. With pickers. 
These string beans landed on our plates that night -- and eventually inside our stomach.

Unidentified grass usually found in the river banks.

Withered flower of an unidentified grass.

Red kulitis in its perfect adaptation form.

Flower and a miniature fruit of the garangan (tagalog: balimbing) (english: star fruit)
(Averrhoa carambola)

Flower of the batwan/batuan tree (tagalog: binukau) (Garcinia binucao).

Used to make dishes sour (like how some people use the tamarind).

Buds of the mansanilya flower (Chrysanthemum indicum)

 

Flower of the shrub tugabang (tagalog: saluyot) (english: jute) (Corchorus capsularis L.). 
Also a favorite vegetable.

Wax begonia, the pink variety (Begonia semperflorens)

My mother tells me this is also begonia but really?
Kinda bears no resemblance from that pink wax begonia above.

            

Flower and leaves of this vine are very similar to ampalaya (Momordica charantia) -- similar in taste too! -- but apparently this is not a bitter gourd judging by its orange fruit (not to mention that it looks much closer to a puffer fish than the actual bitter gourd).

Remaining flower parts of the plant we call "marya marya". 
Its round fruits are as big as the typical marbles, usually green, and turns to orange when ripe. 
Collecting and eating the marya marya fruits during summer is a big part of most Antique's kids' childhood.

Kasla (Jatropha curcas)

Unidentified plant

Alusiman (english: Purslane) (Portulaca olearacea L.) -- but this needs to be verified further

Unidentified grass

Will have to recall the name of this tree

Kulitis (english: Amaranth) (Amaranthus spinosus L.). One of my favorite vegetables.

Called "bariri"and when you search this scientific names comes out: Panicum stagninum Retz. 

I have a feeling it's not it.

Okra (english: lady fingers) (Hibiscus esculentis)

C-o-c-o-n-u-t! (Cocos Nucifera)

Monggo/Munggo (english: mung bean) (Vigna radiata)

flower of the corn

2 kinds of Zea Mays.

Corn field. When i took this shot, the farmer is out there, harvesting some corns for us. 
the corn, just like the string beans, landed on our plates and inside our stomach later that day.








Fin.