More Frankenbikes

Lady driver, reprezent.

I dream of someday driving up to the grocery (or Sunday market) in a bike (tricycle, actually) like this. It's so roomy, and so much the opposite of hyper-engineered suppository cars. I do love improvised vehicles. They are a universe on their own and I wish to someday meet a Maker.


A jeepney route sign.

These larger "frankenbikes"are motorized. I suspect they are mopeds with the option to pedal if needed. Many of them have car steering wheels in place of handlebars. If I had this ride, I would take friends around, maybe have a little tree in a pot somewhere in there, and, maybe, a grill in the back for when I get hungry.


Under the fiesta colors with the token guy that has his shirt up, scratching stomach.


A parked one. Rope on the front bar for tying cargo in.


Rope ties passenger backrest down, scrap slipper rubber keeps driver backrest softish.

And some other human-powered vehicle photos from thereabouts:


Fully loaded pedicab. Note a cheetah print umbrella tucked away overhead, and handlebars held together by tape.


Deluxe ride under a beach umbrella.

Imeldific

Addressing a crowd of very behaved Ilocanos.

So Imelda drops in on the town fiesta of Paoay, and talks about her conversations with Comrade Mao.


Talking about culture.

The Making of An Empanada

A bitten empanada.

The Ilocano empanada has more in common with a lumpia than it does with an actual empanada. It is made with rice flour (making it not doughey at all, and relatively crispy) and is deep-fried in the oil of a million empanadas and longganisas past.


Trying, in vain, to drip some oil out.

The Norte version contains shredded green papaya, munggo (mung beans), an egg, and some longganisa. It is made quite masterfully, and I have tried to compensate for my lack of video coverage by taking a series of (dark) shots.


This woman from Batac claims her grandmother invented the Ilocos empanada. Here's how she makes them:

Ode To A Restroom

The shrine of baby.

I think I sort of know local bathrooms. From the gag-inducing, Trainspotting sort (belonging to stores with the most unfriendly and jaded employees), to literally a plot of soil behind a curtain, Ive been to some pretty memorable ones. At one point, it was a raised wooden structure from which you watch through the slats as your pee flows onto and around the people doing Islamic ablutions in the river. Well, hey, what can you do? I do prefer al fresco, but there are norms you have to follow.

Ilocos Norte is, on the whole, almost faint-inducingly clean compared to the rest of the Philippines (I've been trying to figure out why for quite sometime), thus, needless to say, my restroom experiences here have been better than the average. The Laoag Public Market is a multi-storey deal that is probably one of, if not the cleanest large market in the country. It also houses a (yes, clean) and impressively ornamented public restroom.


Public slippers? No thank you, for me.

As you enter, you spy public slippers so that you don't bring your dirty shoes in, and a plastic flower vine scratches against your head. You wait in line and check yourself out in the mirror, which is accented by several arrangement of orange flowers, likewise faux. There is a small shelf that bears even more petroleum-based plant replicas. Your reflection tells you that behind you is a humorous stock photo of a baby, hanging on the cubicle wall, alongside some small red curtains.


A kilt and cleaning materials beside The Baby.

So you do your thing, thinking about the effort put into maintaining this holy room.


Curtains and an announcement about the Male C.R. (comfort room).

The walls are bright blue, and as you make your way out, your head finally explodes as you see the tip jar (an old powdered milk can wrapped in "Happy New Year" gift paper) resting on a handmade yellow-and-pink doily.


Tip can.

(Pause)

Hello everyone. The silence is deafening, as one reader emails. But hey, I have some things I need to attend to. We will be opening a small shop, Ritual, at The Collective, Makati. It will be a food and interesting-thing store. I am excited. Be posting again when things are less busy.

Peace,
Bea

Salinity: High

R's plate: salted egg, a relish of onions, tomatoes, and bagoong, seaweed salad, local sitao, and the malaga fish.

One thing that drives me mad about being outside Manila is the salty food. Whereas, native residents may be drinking or eating something that just about cancels the ill effects out, I tend not to know what that is (I tried more water, really), and I end up feeling parched.


Sinigang na malaga with the curiously non-hot local green peppers.


Batac longanisa, a bit sweeter than the one from Paoay, but still loads of vinegar.

Though sometimes they can be overzealous in their use of local salt and bagoong, Ilocanos make dishes that are always top-notch, if you add a bit of water when no one is looking. And besides, very few cuisines in the Philippines can rival small-town Ilocos' freshness and high vegetable ratio.


Pinakbet with local sitao and small sigarillas.

In the larger Laoag market's second floor, the vegetables tend towards Chinese imports (you know, large carrots, cabbage, galic, onions) used in making the ubiquitous, gag-worthy chop suey. However, a short ride away to the smaller markets of Batac and Paoay, and you can find local sitao (two varieties-- the straight, bush sort and the longer one, which is still straighter, smaller and deeper green than what I am used to), rabanos, katuray, and many more of the region's unique produce. I'll be back in a few weeks with a better constitution and more time to poke around, so stay tuned.


Ginisang gulay and a salad of seaweed and tomatoes.


That relish, up front, is the famous KBL or kamatis, bagoong and lasona (local red onions).

Push The Button 2 Stop

An old doorbell against faux wood and plastic leather.

Spaceship jeepney. Button was non-functional.


A US flag motif up front.


Some guy's shirt: "Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question, yes is the answer."

Tropical Snowballs

To melt mid-air.

My first encounter of snow, during a visit to Lake Tahoe when I was 11 years old, was a huge disappointment. Heartbreaking, even. Thanks to cheesy American greeting cards and cartoons, I had expected fluffy, cotton candy-like material that I could collapse into and lay in for happy hours on end. Instead, snow was cold, and, later into the day, it was wet. My clothes were soaking, and besides, we saw tracks of a very large feline, so I made my way back into the car.

And what of my first snowball fight before the retreat? It was pretty similar to the ones we had back here, by scraping the ice off the walls of the freezer, and shaping those into little balls before they melted on contact with the tropical air.


Ice shaving machine.

And how to replicate without a freezer? The ice shaving machines for making cool summer treats like halo-halo (every barangay has one).


I can never resist a group of huddled children. They are always onto something good.


Hey!!

Improvised Transportation

A motorized sidecar with an automobile's steering wheel.

This is the Philippines! Our famous jeepneys were born out of improvisation, and continue to harbor so many possibilities for customization and tweaking. The land of stuff like that and homemade skateboards and such also has very cool "enhanced" bicycles in its inner life of warehouses, cheap bagsakans and ports.


Overloading? What is that?

Notice that every area has different standard designs. The above for the warehousing district, while the "reseller haven" Divisoria has room for passengers (owners of sari-sari stores and businesses), but the standard pedicab chairs are elevated for cargo storage under. The photo below is a repost.)


The Divi pedicabs. No more goods-in-your-face squeezing into the passenger compartment.

Wired

Names in wire.

I'm not sure how it is where you live, but if you grew up in the Philippines, remember the time when it was sort of cool to have braces? I'm not sure what transpired, and who clever tintoothed adolescent was able to reverse the stigma and create some kind of strange allure to attach to the stainless steel wire in their mouth.

Anyhow, here's someone making something good of the goods (or, one more skilled street artisan). Joseph will take a roll of dental wire and manipulate it into your name in under five minutes.


Joseph at work.

He makes personalized "pins" to attach to your bags or lapels, or pendants to hang on a necklace.


Long chains to the left of some "common Filipina names".


A kid gets his name enclosed in an electric guitar.

When he's not servicing customers, he's fashioning the actual chains of the necklaces. He also makes the wire part of earrings (not sure what those are called, sorry).


The electric guitar variation.


Earrings.

More earrings.

During the Christmas season he can sell all day by the road without being apprehended, but for most of the year, he does it only during the evenings. I "commissioned" him to do my name on a necklace (for 70 pesos). It was pretty mesmerizing-- but don't take my word for it: