Thinking Allowed: Sugar coated

So...the Philippines have come and gone. Our family took a vote after four days and we all wanted to go to Japan. It’s been a rich and crazy and challenging week, and it’s hard to know how to write about it.

It started when we landed at 1:40 AM, navigated a surreal maze of fast food malls, security checkpoints and highway shoulders, and finally got our room unlocked at 3:30 AM by a surly drunkard. The next day we flew to Legazpi, cruising in over an exciting terrain of bumpy green hills. I almost fell down the airplane stairs because the Mayon volcano was so stupendous (it fills like an eighth of the horizon) and drove half an hour to the town of Camalig.

Now Camalig is a raaandom place to be. We only picked it because of Mayon (truly a gorgeous volcano, and the most active in the country) and to dodge touristiness. And it is an absolutely authentic slice of life in the Philippines. We are the only non-locals in the whole town (pop. ~10,000) and have never been so gawked at. It’s like out of a Stephen King novel where every head turns to follow us. Semis blare their horns at us in greeting, and little kids wave shyly. Every conversation either of us had with a local involved them asking if our spouse was Filipino - nobody could understand why we chose to come to Camalig.

We had fun though. Tamar and the girls did quite a few day trips. They swam at an underground river. They ATVed up the base of Mayon, then Tova did a huge zipline without batting an eyelash. They saw depressed animals at the zoo and happy cows at the farm. They visited Japanese tunnels from WW2 and a 7-tier waterfall. I mostly stayed home teaching girls card games and math.

We only had a couple of food adventures. I tried pinangat, a local favourite. You soak leaves in vinegar, then mix it up with salted fish, and tie it with twine into a sopping bundle of tender green moosh. Kinda delicious, kinda gross, but very new and different. Then I got sharp stomach cramps the next day. Tamar and some girls tried three kinds of chilli ice cream, apparently quite nice. Otherwise local restaurants were not exactly vegetarian-friendly so we mostly cooked rice with ginger and small purple onions, plus eggplant, tomatoes, potatoes or beans. When Tamar had her one meal out in Legazpi, she was surrounded by men eating huge plates of spaghetti, fried chicken, pizza and rice (to clarify, everyone had all four of these - the plates were quartered). The bakeries stock a couple dozen types of bread and pastry, but every one is sugar coated and cloyingly sweet.

People were quite friendly and pleasant overall, but somehow we felt almost like intruders at times. One afternoon we explored some small roads lined with shacks made out of bamboo, boards or cinder blocks, and soon turned back because it felt like we were infringing on people’s lives just by being there. Not sure why. It’s hard to explain.

So we decided to leave, and of course the exact day we changed all of our plane tickets, the Taal Volcano erupted and the Manila airport shut down. Luckily we ended up making it out (and, even more luckily, the eruption was at the second-most active volcano, not the most active one which we were basically on top of).

Now we are in Osaka. None of us have ever been in Japan before, but in our first 8 hours we’ve had nine onigiri, Pokemon ramen, pornographic ice creams, two litres of yogurt drink and milk, a fancy mochi strawberry, and a national bronze medal winning latte, so our stomachs have us all euphoric.