Take, for example, a few years ago, when my baby sister got married. My auntie, who is based in New Jersey, made an impromptu week-long trip back to Manila to help her own baby sister, my mother, with the wedding arrangements. She brought with her my cousin Kaye, whom I hadn’t seen since she was around seven and we were saying goodbye at what was then called the Manila International Airport. The flurry of wedding preparations were spiced up by the flurry of the homecoming that was 15 years in the making, and I enthusiastically took on the task of taking them around Metro Manila and carefully drafted an itinerary of places they ought to see, from Alabang, near where we lived, to the city centers Manila and Makati.
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| Greenbelt |
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| Greenbelt |
In Makati, I took them to Greenbelt, where I showed them the old carabao sculptures near the chapel—my auntie would remember them from when they were still beside the old SM—and fed my companions mango juice, garlic rice and grilled meats and seafood at Ebun and the must-have mango-vanilla-ice-cream-chocolate sauce crêpe La Pinay at the French-inspired Café Breton. It was quite a stretch, in terms of Philippine flavors, but I considered it mission accomplished when my auntie exclaimed, “It’s all so beautiful and everything is so good!” To think they hadn’t even been outside of Manila yet. For Kaye, who was born in Cebu, never really lived in Manila, and didn’t even remember much about the Philippines, it was a different story. Her notions about the country had been nurtured through CNN reports and newspaper articles and images of poverty, but she was game to discover nuggets to the contrary.
Pohot and Article Source: Balikbayan Magazine
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