Christmas in the Philippines

If you love to get into the Christmas spirit, the Philippines is a place for you! We submit a smattering of photos for your consideration:

Between the caroling and the decor and the general cheer, it will sound and look a whole lot like Christmas, but for those of us used to frost on our window panes and nipping at our noses and all that, it may not feel a whole lot like it.

The trade-off is you get to do all the fun stuff that goes with being in a tropical place. We stayed seventeen days in the Philippines, beginning with the twelve days leading up to Christmas. It was merry. It was bright. It was also hot, and we spent most of our time cooling off in water of some kind.

Freshwater

Canyoneering at Kawasan Falls. You'll find this activity on the island of Cebu, not too far from the beach town of Moalboal. This was the best thing we did during our Moalboal stint. It's super popular and thus very crowded, but the right guides will help you navigate through smoothly.

Carl and Carlo were THE BEST guides

Kansanto natural spring pools. Also on Cebu, also within striking range of Moalboal. Way less crowded. It was just us and the fish on the day we visited.

Capilay Spring water park in Siquijor. Christmas Eve morning I stumbled upon this deep, chilly public pool in the middle of a Christmas Village just downhill from St. Augustine of Hippo Catholic Church.

Underground River and Kawasan Falls on Siquijor. On a recommendation from a Filipina we met in Cebu City, we took a guided tour called “Hidden Siquijor” with David, an American expat who made the Philippines his home after being assigned to a Peace Corps ecology project there.

David’s excursion was crafted with exceptional zeal. The underground river and Kawasan Falls were just two of many stops on the island. What I’ll say about these two: they involved lots of stairs in slippery conditions that were totally worth the risk.

Seawater

We went to lots of beaches, where tiny hermit crabs scrambled in the sand as we marveled at the raw destruction wrought by recent typhoons. The snorkeling was excellent. In Moalboal you can rent a mask and flippers for about $5 and peer into a shoal of sardines 30 meters from shore. 

Taking advantage of great conditions and low cost, we got scuba certified in Panglao at one of the many PADI centers. This one, the Haka School, was an excellent outfit managed by a Filipino who’d moved with his family to New Zealand as a child but returned to the Philippines in adulthood. Diving: it’s a smart move to require four learning dives in the basic PADI certification process because, for me, it was only by the fourth that enjoyment of the underwater scenery edged out absolute terror in my brain space. Matt was a natural. “You seem like you’ve done this before,” our instructor told him at one point. Not sure if it was my floundering attempt to maintain neutral buoyancy or my panic during the flooded mask drill that told him otherwise about me.

Service water

Matt and I are pretty sure that the last time a nice cold glass of non-bottled water was placed automatically on our table at a restaurant during a meal, we were back home in the States. It's a very American thing, to have clean drinking water on hand and to offer it free of charge and unsolicited to diners (Europe, yes we are judging you). "Service water" is just the tip of an iceberg of little ways the Philippines reminded us of home.

A few of the others: the asphalt basketball courts in every barangay that are wildly popular with local teens, the omnipresence of English language in signage and conversation, and the vast quantities of fast and fried foods.

It's all good, just not good for you

Do years of US colonial imposition followed by a lingering military presence and contemporary strategic realignment have something to do with some aspects of Filipino culture being all too familiar to Americans? There's no doubt. I'll circle back to this later.

A few final highlights of our Philippines stay:

Live music. Tipped off by a Parts Unknown episode (may Anthony Bourdain rest in peace), we sought out Filipino cover bands at a Manila locale called Handlebar. Apparently high quality covers are something of a competitive sport in the Philippines. Indeed, serious casual musical talent was everywhere – from guides harmonizing on the canyoneering trip to the jukebox karaoke around every corner on the island of Panglao.

This group we happened upon on a random weeknight at Handlebars was excellent.

Guitar Woodhouse on Panglao featured live music every night of the week.

La noche buena. Thanks entirely to the impression made by the Filipino-American friends and colleagues we’ve gotten to know over our years in NYC, we arrived in the country prepared to find a fairly high level of friendliness and hospitality. What we encountered fully exceeded those expectations. Case in point was how we were welcomed by the staff of family-run Swakihan guesthouse on Siquijor to join them in their Christmas Eve party. A full pig roast, games and prizes for all ages, the party went on late into the night.

José Rizal. We departed Manila on December 30th, a significant day in Filipino history. This is Rizal Day, which commemorates the life and works of Filipino national hero José Rizal on the anniversary of his 1896 execution. Rizal was an author, activist, and student of the world. His semi-autobiographical novel Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not) inspired Filipino anti-imperialist sentiment by calling out the abuses of the Spanish colonial government and Catholic church leaders.

I was reading this novel on the plane out of town on Rizal Day, and I wouldn’t get to this part until a few days later, but I found these observations of the situation of colonialism in the Philippines, spoken in the voice of the character Elías, an "indio," particularly astute. On Spain’s use of the Civil Guard to enforce law in the colony: “we should take a good look at to whom we have given this unlimited power, this authority. So much power in the hands of men – ignorant men – full of prejudices, with no moral education, no proven honesty, is a loaded weapon in the hands of a crazy man in the midst of a defenseless population.” On the abuse of power by the Catholic friars: "You could say to me that as imperfect as our religion is now, it is preferable to the one we had. I believe that, and I agree with you, but the cost is too high if it means renouncing our nationality and our independence. In exchange we gave our best towns and our best fields to the priests; we gave our savings to buy religious objects. They introduced to us an article of outside industry: we pay for it and are at peace. If you speak to me of the protection they gave us against indenture, I could answer that in exchange we have fallen under the power of this indenture." From what I’ve heard, Noli Me Tángere is required reading in schools in the Philippines to this day…but just imagine those words landing back in the 1890s. Whoa. 

José Rizal’s execution memorial (Rizal Park, Manila)

After 333 years of Spanish colonial rule, rebellion succeeded. The Philippines declared its independence on June 12, 1898, right in the midst of the Spanish American War. With the US on their side, Filipinos sent Spanish colonial forces packing…and then looked around and realized their American buddies weren't too keen to stand aside. Enter in 45 years under American colonization until World War II, when Japan invaded. Add three years of Japanese occupation. Finally, after the Allied victory ending the war, the US recognized Philippine independence in 1946.

The end result is that a lot of nations have made their mark on the Philippines. In some cases, this influence is linguistic: some 4000 words of Tagalog are borrowed from Spanish, and English is an official language of the country. In others, it's economic: the New York Times had a piece, also on the day we were leaving town, about the long-term impacts of colonialism on the Philippines’ economy, which remains overwhelmingly agricultural and non-industrialized to this day. It's obviously also religious. The country is approximately 80% Catholic, the only Asian nation besides East Timor to have a Catholic majority. On the "Hidden Siquijor" tour we got to observe how Catholicism has woven into the fabric of traditional beliefs at the home of a village healer.

Without a doubt, it's culinary. Which brings me, as a way to wrap up all these reflections, to halo halo. It's a dessert whose name literally means "mixed," and that's what it is – a sugary delicious mix of ube ice cream, sweet beans, condensed, coconut, or evaporated milk, flan chunks, and dried, jellied, canned and fresh fruits, all served over chopped ice. The ube and the fresh tropical fruits are indigenous to the Philippines, the jellies and the sweet kidney beans come from Japanese-style desserts, the flan from Spain, and wouldn't you know it, the shaved ice was introduced by the good old USA. 

Incidentally, the best way to eat halo halo is to just swirl all that together until you get an icy milky soup you can drink. It's the mix that makes it tasty, and I witnessed at least one tourist miss out because he didn't stir his halo halo and pushed it away after the first bite of the odd ingredient, strange in its isolation.