Worn Armrests

New fabric on the armrests of a swivel chair, parked in Teka Market, Little India, where private space becomes public.

Bottle-Pole Improvisations

A Pop Cola bottle serves as a pole to wind a rope around, for securing an out-of-service rain-cover tarp.

Bike Attachments: Bamboo

Improvisations on bikes to accomodate extra baggage (people, merchandise, appliances to be sold at junk shops) are fairly common. This particular one is made of bamboo.

A Pedicab Of the Chinese Brave

Mr. Sam Fenix We Fight What You Fear Chinese Brave

Romance Novel Rental

Off Samar is a wonderful island called Biri.

While the rest of the Philippines has a materials glut (men on bicycles selling fake DVDs around residential areas), Biri seems to keep things to a minimum and in circulation.















Not far from the above sari-sari store / romance novel rental place was a pirated DVD rental shop. Films were rented out at 10 pesos (no due date was given). The usual modern million-dollar movies were present-- every X-Men movie, high school comedies, bachelor party comedies. I rented a Polanski film but never managed to watch it, as island electricity shuts off at midnight.

We were running late for our boat back and attempted to get our moto driver to return the film for us. Apparently, there were two shops on the island, which one was it? I described the way it had the films in their plastic cases, hanging on clothespins. The driver said "Ah", stopped his bike to ask another motorcycle driver (driving in the opposite direction), to return it for him, and tossed the DVD across the air.

The stuff of small islands.

Improvisation for Lack of Censor

Domestic Airport restroom (which is very clean).

Pedicab Lighting Improvisation

Masbate is actually in Bicol, across the ocean from Samar.

Pedicabs are cheap in Samar (5 pesos or so). They are labeled "Masbate Bikes" and are painted in similar patterns, resembling calesas or sorbetes carts.

But the real treat is seeing them at night. The beautiful transformation occurs when riders attach lighting to the bikes after dark. Empty tin cans act as wind guards for lampfires, which are produced by recycled bottle gaseras (usually Lipovitan bottles), filled with kerosene and a dampened wick (some of them seemed like kapok fiber). Flickering lights and (slow) moving vehicles don't usually go together, so it's fun to sit back and watch while eating your oily street food of choice.



















A tin can housing the lit wick of a Lipovitan bottle gasera.



















The gasera is held up by another improvised aluminum part.



















A parked bike, lit up.

Bottle Bottoms And Vegetables

At a market stall, PET soda bottle bottoms, in which round vegetables are nestled.

Samar Food

Kinunot-style shark. It tastes like crab, apparently.

As previously mentioned, mangroves serve as a mediator between two environments (land and water). The food in Samar is similar to what I've gathered used to be pre-urbanization food where I am from (Paranaque), also a mangrove area. Shark and stingray are popular, cooked in an adobo fashion, or kinunot-- with malunggay leaves in coconut milk, the same style in which the rare mega-mouth caught by Sorsogon fishermen was cooked.













Kinunot with peppers.

Small crabs and shrimp are used to flavor vegetable dishes, in place of what would be pork or smoked fish in other parts of the country. Moisture-loving fern or pako is popular.















Fern in coconut milk with shrimp.















Market vegetables-- fern, water kangkong, and yam tops.

Mud crabs are extremely common, as are brackish water shrimp. Communities along the mangroves cultivate these and sell them, walking around with pails of stuff, or dangling live crabs around like they weren't live crabs.













Mud crab tied with a nipa leaf.













Live shrimp for sale in a bucket of brackish water.

Dried fish is extremely popular and inexpensive. One of the cheapest is the espada or cigar wrasse, caught easily in rivers. There are "budget" plastic bags of dried fish available for only 1 peso, and these contain random salted fish assortments that are too small to be sold on their own.















Espada bracelet.















Espada swimming beside a restaurant. We fed them lots of rice.


And oh, the fermentation that transpires is great. Many people preserve their excess catch by fermenting them in brine. These pungent, umami elixirs are used to flavor everything, from soups to sautees. The larger fermented creatures are the convenience food of the region-- ready to eat little fish or mussels, with calamansi juice, and a cup of rice is not an uncommon meal.













Fermented rock oysters, and fermented fish intestines.

In Defense Of Mangroves

A flat-bottomed boat along a Calbayog mangrove.

(Or, sticking up for the disappearing habitat, and the culture that is born out of it. This is an attempt at a sort of mangrove "series".)

Mangroves, or trees that grow in intertidal (foreshore) areas, are a thing of beauty. They jut out of the water with amazing root structures. Because our country has one of the longest coastlines in the world, our beaches should be lined with either mangrove areas, marshes, or rocky surfaces to take yoga pictures on. Note that I did not mention white sand beaches, which are few and far in between in "nature" (more on that later).















Mangrove babies growing in a Biri Island restoration area.

But mangrove areas are not sexy. While they provide waste treatment (they are known as the "kidneys of the earth"), flood protection, and shielding from waves and wind, they are also a tricky habitat for moderns. The water is murky, and there are many living things in it. They filter water coming down from higher land, and solid waste gets stuck in their root systems.

As I mentioned in an old post about Quezon, mangrove areas are the middle ground between the ocean and land. Most marine species spend important time in them. As with any two elements meeting, there is a particular explosion of life. That is how reality works, even in matters of culture.













A mangrove snake, coming up along the bank.

Which brings us to the next thought: when historians say that human settlements formed along rivers and bodies of water, a big part of this was seeing mangrove areas and thinking "FOOD". Even today, in coastal areas, going out to fish in the middle of the ocean is, as I observe, often supplemented greatly by crab culture, brackish water fishing, and snail (and whatnot) collecting in mangrove areas or mudflats with flora. Also, because of weather considerations, people almost never camped on naked beachfronts. In fact, in the South Asian tsunami aftermath, it was found that areas with mangrove trees were not devastated.















The view along a bridge: corn on the bank, and nipa groves in the middle of the river.

Get it? People didn't prefer to settle on a powdery white strip of sand, for obvious reasons. They didn't chop down mangrove trees either to make way for a "clean" view of the ocean. Also, only the foolish would take the tuft down entirely for firewood.

Samar is second only to Palawan in terms of mangrove area remaining (65,119 hectares)-- and the place will continue to be important as mangroves are on a downward trend (we've halved their area in less than a century). Because one cannot ignore the connection between remaining mangrove cover and the "lack of development", we need to pay special attention to leveraging the fantastic productivity of the ecosystems, and preserve these last fronteirs of mudcrabs, canoe commutes, and fermented fish industries.















More mangrove porn along bridges.

This means intercepting idiotic things like the reversal of protected area legislation to build new highways (instead of designing around them), like us crazy Manilans just did with the new C5, and are continuing to do with the new Cavite Expressway. This means acknowledging that the lack of zoning by ecosystem, and the stupidity of development that doesn't respect or leverage nature ("I don't like this river, let me cover it up"), and facing the fact that lost mangrove areas are not only contributing to massive flooding in the country, but also improverishing people (by removing resources previously abundant and "free") within the span of a generation. All us lowlanders have our roots in this kind of environment, so it's worth giving it some thought.