A Barong and a Wedding

Barong Up Close

I was at Raffy and Carla’s wedding last Saturday, and wore for the first time the Barong Tagalog that I will be wearing to my own wedding this June. As I settled into the thin piña fabric for the first time, I entertained a vision in my head of me in this barong, standing at the front of the church five months hence, watching her coming down the aisle towards me. It felt good. There were no cold feet, no butterflies in the stomach, no gnawing doubts or worries; just peace and joy. Time will tell if the day itself — and the years and decades that follow — will truly be peaceful and joyful; I pray they will be.

Raffy and Carla’s wedding was great, a grand old Filipino-Catholic affair at the church in Forbes, with a reception in the Peninsula Hotel in Makati. I estimate at least 300 people in attendance, some of whom were old, old friends. Photos here.

Offline a Little Longer

I’ve been back in Manila for a few days now, but I’ve lost the “neighborly” wireless I was leeching, and what little internet I’m able to access at various coffee places in Greenhills and Makati continues to be slow to the point of uselessness, thanks to the Taiwan earthquake cable fault. (I’m getting very tired of having to order a decaf frappuccino everytime I want access to this painfully feeble trickle of connectivity.)

Flickr has gotten especially slow in these times of slower-than-dialup international throughput, so I don’t think I will be able to upload any more photos till I get home to my now-much-missed 768 kbps home DSL connection. I fly out tomorrow. It’ll be a 30 hour trip, including an 8 hour layover in Hong Kong and yet another 16 hour transpolar flight. Site feedback will be off until I get home, and later on there will be more photos and entries on what I’ve been up to.

(Of course, PLDT would finally send someone to fix our home DSL the day before I leave.)

Last Entry for the Year

This will probably be my last entry for the year, as my current 24 hour WIZ pass is about to run out, the internet has been dog slow thanks to the earthquake, plus I’m going to an old friend’s wedding tonight, and first thing tomorrow morning I’m off to Club Noah in Palawan for a few days of scuba diving through New Year 2007. I hope that you, faithful reader, enjoy what’s left of the Christmas and New Year holiday season, and may God richly bless you all in the year to come.

Comments and trackbacks will be off till I return. For now, please enjoy my Manila Christmas 2006 photoset, and see you all in January with a bunch of new posts, and hopefully some nice underwater photos, too.

Saddam Executed

Saddam Hussein has been hanged. My first thought on seeing the news was, “I wonder if this counts towards the ‘Three Famous Deaths’ rule, after James Brown and Gerald Ford?” Then my second thought was that wow, internet traffic’s going to skyrocket starting right now, so I’d better post something.

So what’s good about this hanging? Justice served, I suppose: Iraq gets to execute a tyrant and a murderer, under the watchful eye of the U.S. occupying forces, who achieve a powerful symbolic victory by handing over Saddam to the Iraqi government.

The bad part is that it doesn’t go far past symbolic. Osama bin Laden remains at large, Iraq is still a growing mess of terrorist insurgencies, weapons of mass destruction there are nonexistent, U.S. armed forces are overstretched between Afghanistan and Iraq, and the project to bring peace to the Middle East and safety to the rest of the world by planting the roots of democracy doesn’t seem to have had much success beyond this hanging.

(I wonder if it’s worth noting that today is also the anniversary of José Rizal’s execution. I think the prospect of Saddam’s death having similarly galvanizing effect on Iraqi resistance by raising him up as a figurehead martyr is pretty remote considering that Rizal was a lot less of a murderous demagogue.)

More on MeFi, WaPo, and that’s all the links I can muster right now because the Internet sure is slow.

Caturday!

Now with bonus dog!

I have yet to fly home to Pandora, so all the Caturday I can offer you this weekend is one of the Philippines’ ubiquitous stray cats which I managed to startle under a parked SUV in a church parking lot:

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To make up for the lack of any other cat photos, here are a few photos of our black labrador, Nicole, being all lazy and liquid-like:

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Greenbelt Panoramas

I’ve spent the last couple of days hanging out at Greenbelt (last night to meet with old friends Tiff and Sonni), and I definitely like what they’ve done to the place. Long time readers will remember my post on Makati’s evolution — one that continues to this day. Witness what has become of that space in the time since then:

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As you can see, Greenbelt is still a work in progress; the old shopping arcade behind Greenbelt 1 has now been razed, and will be turned into what I assume will be Greenbelt 5 and 6. It’s a bit sad to see that rickety old building go, with its tiny mom-and-pop shops, but it’s enough consolation to know that Ayala does commercial public spaces really well: lots of sweeping architecture, open outdoor spaces, trees, fountains, and ample sitting room, as evidenced by the areas around Greenbelts 2-4. Lots of good food, too.

Have the Water Current an Empress

Open the hot water valve, have the water current an empress, the square can connect to switch on electricity the source!

This is a sticker on the front of the water dispenser Dad just got. Made in China. We still don’t know what it means, and the hot water spout still doesn’t work. Anyone got an empress handy? We’re fresh out.

McRice Burger

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This is a Beef Supreme McRice Burger, a beef patty with lettuce and sauce between two patties of molded sticky rice rather than the usual bread bun. It’s apparently been a big hit at Asian McDonald’s outlets, though my friends here in Manila say the P100 price tag for a meal is a bit steep. Coming from the land of $7 lunches, I say $2 is great for a McRice Burger with fries and soda, even at Filipino serving sizes. I’m certain a good part of the price goes to that unique packaging, a pull-and-peel tab affair which makes it possible to eat the rice sandwich without getting the fingers all sticky. McRice Burger, B+ score! (It would get an A if it were just bigger, but again, Filipino serving sizes.)

Happy Operculectomy Plus Shave and a Haircut Day!

You’ll be about halfway to the clinic way out in Alabang before you realize you’ve forgotten the panoramic X-Ray you spent 800 pesos on last week to see how straight your wisdom teeth are.

The dentist said that the best thing would be to eventually have them all extracted, but the soonest the oral-maxillofacial surgeon would be available for such a procedure would be two days before your multi-leg flight back home, no part of which would make the post-operative pain and swelling much more fun than it would be normally. Instead, she recommended a simple operculectomy as a stopgap measure until such time that a full extraction could be executed. This is a removal of the operculum, the little extension of gum tissue over the top of a semi-erupted wisdom tooth which traps food particles and makes cleaning difficult. It’s a periodontal procedure, but the surgeon can do it easily, much sooner.

You’ll get the X-Ray and arrive at the clinic an hour late, but the surgeon will be fine with it since she’s running late, too. While you recline in a chair facing towards the highway, you’ll share a laugh over how your second cousin was head of oral-maxillofacial at her med school while she was there. You’ll have to take off your wrist watch, as the thermal cauterizer requires removal of metal from exposed skin, then she’ll inject local anesthesia into your gums in three different spots. She’ll say it’ll sting but it won’t hurt too much, and soon the whole left side of your mouth will be heavy and numb. At any given time there’ll be two or three dental implements and fingers in your mouth, probing, dabbing, cutting, sucking, cauterizing, and sometimes a bit of sensitivity will flash some pain through the anesthesia, but you’re a strong and courageous trooper who isn’t bothered by a little twinge.

The whole time, the surgeon will be explaining how third molars are encased in a sac of tissue which encourage their eruption, but sometimes the sac mucosa can stay around the crown of the tooth and merge with the gum, forming the operculum which covers a semi-erupted wisdom tooth and provides a place for bacteria to thrive and cause pericoronitis. While she talks about this, you’ll ponder on how nice it would be for dentists and periodontists and such to provide little keyboards hooked up to speech units by the reclining chairs for patients to be able to converse, Stephen Hawking style.

The procedure will be done in about fifteen minutes, ending with something like a chewing gum wad placed over the newly exposed crown of your wisdom tooth, to protect it and shape pockets out of your new gumline. The surgeon will tell you to take some over-the-counter pain killer as soon as you get home, and that the worst of the pain and swelling will be within 48 hours, after which it will subside.

Later that day, you’ll go to the barber shop of your childhood for your usual yearly shave and haircut (where “shave” is code for full face and upper body massage with hot towel and maybe a shave), but you’ll find the place closed and abandoned, doors chained up and barber pole dark. The security guard will tell you that it’s gone, but there’s a new barber shop around the corner, where most of the barbers have moved to because the owner of the old barber shop ran out of money. You’ll go to the new barber shop and get a 330 peso shave and haircut, but your childhood barber will have retired earlier this year and the new guy is just a bit too harsh with his massage fingers and a bit too light with the razor. You’ll tip him generously anyway, and look in the mirror to see if your cheek is swelling — it isn’t — and be amazed at how old you look with this new crew cut and those dark circles under your eyes.

Happy Operculectomy Plus Shave and a Haircut Day!

(With apologies to Girls Are Pretty.)