Market Manila

The alarm clock was set for the ungodly hour of 2:00 a.m., and it blared for several seconds before it was silenced! Even for Marketman, an early riser, waking at this hour was painful. Did I really want to see the Pasil Fish Market in downtown Cebu, apparently the largest seafood market in the Visayas, that badly? Well, yes actually, I did. And I have wanted to see it for many years. A suitable guide, the father of one of my office colleagues in Cebu, who was a regular shopper and re-seller of fish from Pasil, would be waiting for me in a van, ready to head to the market in just 10 minutes. The office crew were somewhat mortified that I wanted to visit this market at its peak trading hour around 2 a.m., instead of a much less active version during the day. The crew expressed concerns about the seedy neighborhood, the various questionable “characters” hanging around the place, the sanitary conditions, etc. I had survived a trip to the Carbon Market at midnight several years ago, but I had to admit I was a bit apprehensive during that visit, so I wasn’t taking their concerns for granted. Instead, we agreed to hit the market with the guide and 3 guys tagged along to see the sights as well, a couple of them Marketman certified fish buyers… I was happy to have the company, and I would not have felt comfortable there by myself, taking flash photographs, particularly when it came to some of the more exotic, if not contraband fish. I do not recommend an obvious neophyte traipsing through the Pasil market in the wee hours of the morning… Having said that, nothing even remotely untoward occurred in the 45 minutes I spent at the market, though I was clearly a fish out of water and the hundreds of regulars there knew that…

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Native chickens, whether from the North or South, taste better, in my opinion. They have more flavor, character and grit. They are often much leaner/tougher than farm raised chickens, but for certain dishes, that is highly desirable. I recently had a superb tinola made with native chicken and malunggay and lemongrass that had been cut just minutes before and I can tell you it was much more memorable than some really pricey soups I have ordered in fancy shmancy restaurants. When I used to visit my grandparents in Cebu during summer vacations, my grandmother, a doctor, would almost always serve a soup made with native chickens and malunggay. But what used to shock me no end, as a city slicker 8 year old, was that she had many grateful patients (who she had treated and never asked for payment if they couldn’t afford it) who would often line up outside her front gate to seek more medical care and would bring native chickens, a piece of broken antique pottery, a skull or teeth as a token gift for the doctora. Often, our lunch was a freshly whacked native chicken from a patient’s back yard. Too real for an 8 year old…

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I have taken local countryside vistas for granted for many, many years. I have spent so much of my life in huge metropolitan areas, all over the world, often in highly congested and polluted cities like Manila, so it isn’t a surprise that I am now increasingly drawn to visiting more rural or provincial locales. A personal promise to see more of the Philippines is also pushing me to pursue trips to places that I have never been to before… So, considering that I was born in Cebu, spent summers there as a kid and recently have taken over 80 trips to the city in the past 6 years, it amazes me how little of the island I have actually visited. Marketman & family made it to Carcar a few months ago, and a couple of weeks ago, I took some of our office crew on a road and boat trip up to Malapascua Island. As we headed further North, the mountainous, hilly, craggly landscape of central cebu suddendly shifted to an incredibly verdant green, with sugar plantations in and around Bogo and Medellin, definitely a soothing sight for sore eyes.

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A couple of weeks ago, Marketman & Company went off to Malapascua, that small island on the Northern tip of the island of Cebu. The next dozen or so posts shall chronicle highlights of our terrific trip up North. A leisurely three hour drive plus 30 minute banca ride from Cebu City, Malapascua is a diver’s paradise and sometimes hailed as a “mini-Boracay” or “Boracay -15 years ago”. Heading North out of the City of Cebu, at the early hour of 5 a.m., we passed Mandaue, Liloan (where the famous Titay’s rosquillos are made), and through more and more rustic towns along the Eastern coast of Cebu. We kept our eyes peeled for roadside bibingkas that one of my crew recalled enjoying on previous trips along this route. Finally, in the outskirts of Catmon, we ran across some roadside street vendors whose stalls were just letting off a phenomenal amount of smoke.

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I have written about balimbing (carambola, starfruit), the fruit, before. It isn’t one of my favorites, but I have seen balimbing for sale in the markets often. Though I wonder about when it is really in season as I have seen them in the markets around now, at the height of summer, and oddly, I have seen them in the fall or later in the year as well… Do they bear fruit several times a year, like some mango trees? But oddly, I have never seen a carambola or balimbing tree. Or at least not knowingly.

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Just a quick post for those seeking something new, fruitwise. The Kid brought these kiwiberries home from the grocery a few weeks ago and they were pretty cool. We tend to avoid overly “engineered” fruits that seek to create new hybrids by splicing genes from here and there… yet they often yield some pretty interesting results. I don’t know much about kiwiberries, but I suspect they fall into the category of commercially sponsored adjustments to the natural evolutionary process of fruits and vegetables.

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Here are some photos of the flowers from The Kid’s Confirmation. I very rarely volunteer to do large-ish public events like this, but if The Kid is involved, the “it’s a once in a lifetime event” logic kicks in. But I am getting wiser in my old age and once I had acquired the raw materials, a living room full of flowers and assorted materiel, I spent just 2 hours or so in the wee hours of the morning making the actual arrangements so that they could be at the church by 8:30 a.m. There were 10 “pieces” for the event, a large arrangement at the foot of the altar, pictured up top. This arrangement was placed inside a very large copper fish poacher that is roughly 2.5+ feet in length. The arrangement had some 8 ornamental cabbages, roughly 20+ heads of milflores or hydrangeas, deep pink roses and a few snapdragons. It took less than 15 minutes to put together as I had already set up the base with oasis the night before. I thought it was a bit intense… But you could see it from halfway back it the church, despite its relatively small size against a stunningly overdone gold painted altar as the background…

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Marketman is utterly crazed at the moment, so you will have to excuse me for a day or two while I prepare for The Kid’s confirmation this weekend. I volunteered (?!) to do the flowers for the church for the confirmation ceremony of roughly 2 dozen ladies and gentlemen, or is it still girls and boys? I only volunteer to do these things once a year or so and I am always utterly crazed the day before. While I have learned some tricks along the way, such as avoiding highly labor intensive tasks like having to de-thorn 3,000 roses and arrange them carefully, opting instead for larger blooms that are more visible and less work, the logistics of these types of events are always daunting. And with a limited budget chipped in by all of the parents of the kids, and Marketman’s innate gene for going just a little over the top, the challenge is always a good one. Several readers have asked me to do a post on ornamental cabbages so here are a few photos. Ornamental cabbages are not the same as cabbage roses (the later a very lush and heavily petaled flower, the former a close relative of cabbage, as in cole slaw). King Louis farms seems to be growing these up North, so they are plentiful, beautiful and well-priced as well. If you could see our home at the moment, it is EXPLODING with more raw materials than a typical florist would buy in a week, and here is a sampling…

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