Sayaw Pera

"Sayaw Pera"

Literally translates as the "money dance." The bride and groom dances while the relatives and friends pin money on their clothes. The newlyweds get to keep the bills after the dance, of course.

Sunday- At Church

Its Sunday. Time for the faithful to hear mass. This was taken surreptitiously at St. Joseph Cathedral at the end of the service. This has been a practice that's been done for a while now. At the end of the mass people, mostly children, surge towards the Priest to pay their respects by pressing the priest's knuckles against their foreheads.

To better understand this tradition you can check my previous blog about this.

Just in case you're wondering why this photo is blurry, its just my way of showing the madhouse that is the church every time it ends. Hehe

Tipasi, Rice and all the Grains

Some people take their siesta every afternoon. Some watch their favorite Mexican, Korean or local tele-serye (TV soaps) . And yet some people spend their time lovingly picking out the 'tipasi' , and other unprocessed by products (or is it the other way around?) of rice grains.

Its a meditative exercise, I imagine.

"...Oops, a stone, oh another un-milled grain ('tipasi'). That's the thirtieth piece in this minute alone."

My nanay used to do 'tahop'. Its where she uses a flat, semi concave basket (?) weaving ('nigo'), to remove the stones, un-milled grains and other impurities. You should see her make the dirt fly. I used to be all so know it all (still is, sometimes, actually- according to a certain cousin) and get the nigo from her and try to do what she does only to make half of the grains fly. The-should-and-the-shouldn't-fly-grains floating in the air. It was beautiful... disaster. Hehehe. One of my early brushes of guilt, I should imagine.

Jeepney’s Torotot-- Random Photos #1

Watching the photos posted at another site inspired me enough to overcome my shyness in posting my pictures. It's not that their photos are so horrible compared to mine that I am confident mine would be better.

On the contrary I have finally accepted that it'll take a lot of time, practice and better equipments to make me a good photographer. So for the meantime I hoped to take interesting (I hope) photos to compensate with these deficiencies.

Lately, I found myself bored with my trees, branches and other nature pictures.

It's probably because my cousin gets all giddy whenever she sees these things.

"Ate Ly! Take that photo!" Bossy little brat that she is. (Says me, with a lot of affection).

Or because I find it extremely difficult to get good pictures of nature (without me in it ).

Right now, in order to serve up a slightly different take on the Philippines I browsed through my files and came up with these:

The girl pressing her forehead against the grandmotherly figure is doing what we call being "blessed" or kissing the hands of the elderly. It is how we pay our respect.

I was inside the calesa when I took this picture. You can see those metallic vehicles parked at the side of the streets. They're called jeepneys. It's one of the Philippine's major means of public transportation.

Have you seen "The Dukes of Hazzard" where Seann William Scott's character, Bo, kept on blowing General Lee's annoying musical horns? That annoying little noise maker was originally a part of a jeepney. That is until laws were put into action prohibiting its use in public. Too bad. No more pesky heckling, mooing and whatever sounds Filipino horn makers could come up with, in traffic.

And this last photo was something that I have always tried to capture until now. You know how my camera is.

Those huge things at both sides of the motorcycles are probably stocks of merchandise that that guy was transporting from one place another.

That is all for today.

It's sunny outside.

Time for me to go out and play.

Take care!