The Sanitized Farm Experience

Listing the reasons of why and how we love her is an infinite enumeration. So among the list of an endless many, we dwell on some specificity. For one, the little one and I love D. for coming up with ideas for our weekend trips. We all love staying at home too, but she must have known that the little one needs to smell the grass, stare at open spaces, hear the sounds the world makes.

This weekend, we found ourselves at the "Balik Bukid" Country Fair at the Sta. Elena Fun Farm in Cabuyao. Sta. Elena is a gated community which is more of an estate, golf and country club over a farm. It also houses the Acacia school. We still dream about enrolling our little one in the that Waldorf school.

D. writes, We had a terrific time and I can tell from the face of the little one he found the whole place A.W.E.S.O.M.E. He laughed really loudly when we took him near the carabao resting beneath the tree but was really quiet when we rode the carabao-driven cart that took us around the farm. We decided to hang around the Kids' Playground where he enjoyed sitting on the swing, jumping on the trampoline, and balancing on the bamboo bars.

We chased chickens and geese, heard the cows moo out loud, and heard good music from the guest world/folk group who played. We were with M & L and their little one P. We all had time to lie in the grass. The farm folks let you use abaca mats for free. M. had a few cold cans of San Miguel Premium. I knew I can always count on him. Out there in the grass, thirsty from chasing little ones, it's a sweet quench.

We all had a genuine, wholesome-is-awesome time.


And you notice so many beautiful contrasts in the place, beginning with a farm within an golf and country club estate. We were trying to coin the term for it, and it gave the upper-class hippie feel. The folks who welcomed you at the registration site had the local bourgeoisie accent, or something that sounds like it. It's still summer, so some of the ladies who bought and sold products still had beach tans on mestiza skin. A foreigner who reeked of alcohol was drinking the organic beer they sold. This farm crowd and the owners/sellers at the fair had their own soapy-clean smell blended with the pervading smell of horse manure and cow dung. The wash areas will have flower or tea-scented soaps as well as newly-opened bars of white Safeguard.

The watermelon ice-drops we tried must've had a hint of mint and herbs and if that parch in your throat were a bull's eye, the ice drop hits it right on the spot.

Ultimately, the farm couldn't hold without a Starbucks. So there was a little Starbucks booth and people lined up. A real farm would barely have a real toilet, but this one had cleanest, nicest-smelling portalets we've ever used. We called it a sanitized farm experience. Except for the reasonably-priced food, we didn't even have to pay for anything.

It was also a quick, pleasurable drive and with no traffic. Playlists on queue, we cruised the Sky Way between 80-100 km/h and while driving requires concentration I thought a lot about how the little would remember how we drove as a family. We were home in a little over half-an hour. A 12km per liter fuel-efficient car like ours probably got us back and forth in less than 500 pesos. The toll fees would cost more than the gas.

With all the running around all day, the little one was already asleep in the car. D. & I have a dinner of soup and chicken wings with a few beers when we arrive home. We were tired. We describe "tired" uniquely, how this tired didn't make us distressed, but delighted. It left us eager, eager to live, as though we held the key to unscrew all these ironies.

Granular

Mactan, Cebu 2012

"Whoever designed this resort must have been obsessive-compulsive." D. says. It's as though they clean the sand to the last granule. Everywhere you looked, it was manicured and landscaped to perfection. It was as if all that you thought of doing or needing was thought-of for you. You can golfcar your way from the lobby to your villa. There are scheduled rides going to the city. There's a playground and day-care center for children. There's a fully-equipped gym. We kept asking if the tasteful furningshings were by Kenneth Cobunpue. You can have a massage by the beachfront, or at the quiet-zone zen-inspired spa. You can have them call a cab, or fetch you the paper. There are four restaurants within the resort. Like most of the places here, it had it's own private beach. The staff greeted you at every opportunity. The long infinity pool got our little I. to a repeated chant, pleading in his tiny voice: swim, swim, swim!

I. on the outdoor playground in front of the day care

Where our feet were at their best

On the redundance of listening to Urbandub while on a treadmill in Cebu.

Some of it came sincerely, and all of it of course, for the fee. There is a certain unnatural element in tailored places. It is not what it really is, but what it wants to become, or how it imagines itself. Well, we were no longer backpacking on unhinhabited islands. Once in a while we didn't want to worry about chores or have any cares for the day except to immerse into more of the pleasure.

Beer was at a golden 120 per bottle. Wine and cocktails ranged from 300-400 per glass. So we got drunk during happy hour, when you buy one and get one. It was right on time for the sunet. The outdoor bar called Azure played the classic chillout music that warped me into exactly what I needed to hear. I figured someone else still has a copy of the Salinas Sessions. We lounged under huge white sunbrellas, our three bodies splayed and spread out on plush daybeds that fit two 2 or more. The baybeds came with a view of the changing colors of sunset transforming into a skyful of stars. The side table had our beers, and his sippy cup.




Pizza always tastes better by the beach. We had vegetables and feta cheese with more beer. Tipsy enough before the prices go back up to regular hours, we head back to the garden villa. The little one swims some more in the bath tub. There's a already a 40-inch TV in the room, and another flat TV in the bathroom.




Lights out at 8pm. We talk a little bit about our adevntures in tents, sleeping bags, or the time we actually slept in the sand, by the beach from a few summers before. Tonight, the three of us sleep on what feels like 1,000-thread fabric against our burnt skin.

Bourdain Says So

It was happy hour, and we were having mojitos with a serving of sunset. The little one was busy playing with the sand. We've only been eating resort food, and the angus beef burgers and vegetarian pizzas we've ordered had their flair. But we were in Cebu, and it would be a sin not to eat lechon.



We take a cab out of the resort, to the Zubuchon in Mactan.

It triggers an association of a first discovery, like the first time you tasted candy. The pleasure of eating lechon skin is like that, except that it's not just sweet. It's steamy, crunchy, salty, and seeped in roasted fat.

We only went out of the resort once, and it was to eat lechon. Zubuchon distinguishes itself as a healthy lechon, or organic lechon and I have another oxymoron. The pig is fed only with organic food, was probably free to roam, with no MSG used in the preparations.

Organic or not, gobblig a half-kilo along with a few bottles of Pale Pilsen made the back of my neck stiffen a little bit. I felt my eyes chink, suggesting a cholesterol high. The taste consumes you completely, and you know you are somewhere else, but you belong. That's how, and where, lechon Cebu takes you.

Salty Spectacular

Mactan, Cebu 2012

I watched my wife and my almost-two-year-old walking at the edge of the beach, staring at the sea. I can hear the little one laughing at the sound of waves crashing. It was the most charming peal of laughter. It must have been the bright glare that bounced off my sunglasses. It must have been this humid, salty air that embraced us, that elevated us. Something deep in the chasms of my subconscious awoke. It's a familiar feeling of lightness, of resolutely floating aimlessly.

She is on her royal blue bathing suit. I'm on a white, buttoned down polo, our little one on blue trunks and a white shirt. It was searingly hot and we were all wearing spectacles. It was all spectacular. I know we glowed from inside.

I couldn't wipe off the grin on my face.

The Last Infant-Without-Seat Booking

Mactan Island, Cebu 2012

A few months before he turns two, he's already formed a contemplative look. They say he has a snobbish appeal. Here, he shows the airplane that contemplative look. It'll be our little one's last infant-without-seat booking. As he was during his first plane ride, he also kept the habits of a good passenger.

I'm flying on miles that I converted from credit card points. We didn't have to scurry for cheap fares or be compelled to choose budget airlines since we're practically just paying for 1 in this trip. With due diligence, and a knack for picking out resorts that suit our tastes and purposes, D. found an excellent deal for our accomodations.

I remember how much we wrote about Cebu the first time we were here. We thought we were on high scale of bliss then, and we told ourselves we'll come back.

We discover not just places, but so much of ourselves whenever we go away.

Page Turning

A lady opens her book. She is clear-skinned, white but not pale, glossy, maintained and moisturized. Her sleeveless beige dress runs straight from a flat chest, uninterrupted by a flat stomach on to her ankles, the fabric soft enough to ripple with the hot, noon breeze. Her hair is in a sensible bun. Her eyes were wide and animated.

We were in an out-of-office meeting that we had offsite, in a popular coffee shop. The meeting has been running for over two hours: tedious, loud, and repetitive. The lady’s book was a best seller, and she’s been reading for all the two hours we were having our meeting.

More minutes roll into the meeting’s mind-numbing babble, and I spot the lady spontaneously and unembarrassedly weeping. She held the book between her thumb and the rest of her fingers, and kept crying. She does not pause. She does not take time to recover. She turns the page, and keeps reading.


***

I must have been seven or eight years old. We were in class, and I remember the white light coming through the huge windows dousing itself from the corridors into our classroom. It must have been a pretty boring class, and one of my classmates must have been sowing the seeds of what perhaps is, independent thinking.

My classmate was A.A. - big-bellied and sloppy but way smarter than anyone would have thought he looked.

During class, he was reading a non-school book he borrowed from the library. He hid it on between the textbook for our Grade 2 or Grade 3 class. He held the ends of the textbook with his left and right hand, but the library book was tucked in between. I wish I could remember what that other book was – I would have read it, if only for the risk he took.

The teacher eventually noticed. The teacher removed the decoy textbook and revealed, to both the surprise and delight of the entire class, that A.A. was reading was something else and deliberately hiding it. He looked interrupted, but did not look embarrassed.

He got caught. I remember my classmate and think of him proudly.



***


The College kids of my time must have read and conversed more often. Therefore, we must have lived more. We must have been among the last few who didn’t completely rely on the internet. It was still SMS over social media, journals or print instead of blogs, network games over online games, libraries over search engines. It existed then and we adopted it, but we must not have been as reliant. When we become reliant on technology, a necessary persistence towards knowledge is lost.

Whenever you are looking for your next book to buy nowadays, you go to amazon.com for the reviews or look at the commentary from virtual libraries.

Back in College, you found out what to read next in reviews written in newspapers, campus publications and through actual conversations.

I remember how I heard about Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. It was through a review published in the Philippine Collegian. A college student wrote about how he chose to end the last chapter of the excellent book. He read that part in the loo, standing up in the toilet bowl. I remember how I admired it then, and thought, how intellectual, how bohemian . In these times, someone else would have thought, how poser or how hipster.

We let ourselves be young.


***


24 and 25 summers old, lovers for less than a year. Even with beautiful novelty of being in our first year as lovers, our careers bored us to tears. So we juggled work with Graduate School if only for the nostalgia of learning again, with subliminal wishes of ending up with a more fulfilling occupation. And we often drank, we often went to the movies or the theater. We often travelled out of town. We were often starved and we found ways to make ourselves satisfied. We've had our highs.

In afternoons after Saturday classes, we lie in bed with a poetry volume we borrowed from the university library. We read poetry together.

A line from a poem hits the mark:

Through separate evenings, when
only you can take the stars
or give me the moon, while I assemble
all the reasons why I love
you, this way, still.

(From Rita B. Gadi’s Kidapawan in my Heart)

I love you this way, my D. On our separate evenings, only you can take the stars, or give me the moon.



***


The Shape of Me and Other Stuff; Dr Seuss. It was before he learned to recognize, form words, mumble or comprehend. He was not even a year old when I started reading it to him. I must have done it to him a thousand times, as I could now recite it from memory. But I didn't how how we took it, I had no clue if there was anything he understood, or how the spirit was forming in him. I knew my mind was as blank as his.

I just kept reading it to him.

He was already walking then, so he must have been over 12 months. He walks to his shelf, picks out this book, walks on his still-wobbly knees and hands it to me. The look was instinctive, pure and moving. I acknowledged the request, and with this gesture - I unmistakably felt that he was loving me back.

We turn a page and read.