14. Going Downtown for Some Sweet Singing

Hi Everyone,



Here's a picture of Heide and Sweet. Sweet's real name is Ava Marryl Parreño. Filipinos love nicknames and her family even gave her a second nickname of "Ping-Ping". Heide looks annoyed in this picture because of the leaf hanging right in front of her face. Sorry I didn't "Photoshop" it out, but removing the leaf would not have changed her expression.

Sweet is Head Nurse and Administrator at Saint Louis Hospital, which is affiliated with Saint Louis University. So, as a faculty member at Saint Louis University, she sang yesterday in SLU's MusicFest.





Here's Heide leaving Denzil's house so that Heide, Marilyn and I could go together to watch Sweet perform. Marilyn is Denzil's wife. You can see Denzil's house in the background with their house number showing on the gate. This is a typical Filipino gate that opens for cars to enter but also has a small door built into it for people to bump their head while entering. (I have so many scars from jeepney's, cabs and this gate!)





Heide encounters a tea salesman just outside our gate. We will join him in waiting for a jeepney to take us to city center. In spite of the huge words on our gate saying "Don't block the driveway anytime", some annoying cab driver parked his vehicle right in our driveway. This happens much too often! Whenever we bring a cab-load of groceries from city center, we always have to hunt for cabbies and have them move their cars in order to get our cab with groceries inside our gate. The cabbies are usually hanging out at the grocery store or in the pool hall next to it.





In this long shot, you can see Marilyn coming to join us. You can also see the little grocery store to the left, our neighbors to the right, and a house up on the hill. The house on the hill was never finished and perches precariously above us just waiting for the next landslide or earthquake to change it's location.





Marilyn, Heide and the tea salesman wait for the jeepney. You can see our gate in the background to the right.

I have no idea what "Buko Juice" is, but I've gotten used to not knowing what things are when I eat or drink them.





A jeepney turns around just down the road a few feet and the tea salesman walks to it. Notice the way people hang their clothes out to dry. The house to the left has clothes hanging next to their water tank. Colorful clothes adorn the landscape like Tibetan prayer flags. Not sure what they're praying for-- probably just drier clothes.






Inside the jeepney we see some kid texting to the left and our favorite tea saleman playing videogames to the right while we're riding into city center. Two passengers sit upfront with the driver. Above the driver's head (out of our view) is a sign which says "Bayad Muna Text", which means "Pay Before Texting". Obviously this is common behavior. Maybe people figure they can text themselves into a free ride.





Looking in the other direction towards the back of the jeepney, we see a guy holding on on the outside of the jeepney while it's moving. Some people prefer to ride this way. Not me!

You can also see with the low ceiling, passengers like me have to crouch down to get in and out. The guy outside probably laughs at us knowing that he will never hit his head on the ceiling. He may kill himself falling out the back, but he will never hit his head on the low ceiling! Low ceilings or hanging outside-- it's all the same price. The most expensive fare is 13 pesos (about 28 cents)-- not counting the senior discount I get.

Notice that these last two photos inside the jeepney are quite dark. I turn the flash off before taking the shot and pretend that I'm texting while I'm really taking pictures. Who wants to get punched out in a jeepney?!






After waiting and watching other performers for four hours, we finally see Sweet perform. She really knows how to belt out a tune! The music they sing is American pop music-- like something Aretha Franklin would sing. Sometimes they would actually sing two tunes-- one American pop and the other ethnic Filipino. When an event lasts as long as this one, why not add an extra tune here and there! Nobody wants to leave anyway. Rarely do you see such an enthusiastic audience! Many times I had to cover my ears to protect from the roar of the audience. The entertainers were ok. It was the audience that was destroying my eardrums. When things became dull, the announcer would call out the name of a college (like "College of Humanities"), and that part of the audience would roar at unheard-of decibels. It was a cheap way to stir up the crowd.

After the concert was over, Sweet treated us to dinner at a "Chung-King" fast food place. I was so tired I actually staggered to the place. We had started out waiting for the jeepney eight hours ago and arrived an hour and a half early for a performance that lasted six hours! Anyway, glad to be at a place where food was the main attraction instead of singing, I found that I could not identify anything on the menu, so I just ate what they ate. It was actually quite good. I did, however, pick out liver from my soup. I hate liver! I don't know what liver has to do with chicken soup in the first place! I know. It's not really chicken soup. It's probably some long name that I can't pronounce.

What fast food place that you know of uses metal silverware. This one did.

In any case, I slept well last night.

For breakfast this morning, we had hot ginger tea (yummy! My favorite!). We also had fried rice with egg in it, fried chicken, fish and some vegetable which was really spicy. I enjoy spicy food and this was really good and hot, but I'm not used to it at breakfast. The food is really tasty, but matches the word "dinner" more closely than "breakfast". No problem, however. We will see most of this food again at dinner. Sometimes they feel sorry for me and serve me corn flakes with milk, but not today. They even treat me with mashed potatoes sometime, so I get a break from rice, rice and even more rice.



Duane and Heide.