As she comes home to Cebu after 13 years of living in the United States to take care of her ailing mother, my former teacher Ploi Pagdalian dreads the fact that she has very little time left to be with her mom who is now over 80 years old. She thus uses the few remaining [...]
Exactly eight days since the day the world was supposed to end, we went biking early morning here in Surigao City to the safest place if Armageddon did happen.
The new central library of the University of San Carlos in Talamban is a monolithic modern building designed according to principles of green architecture and is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, such as electronic databases, digital cataloging, and online research systems.
Teaching has forced me to try to make it a habit to be prompt. You have to be in the classroom before students arrive, or at least before the “invisible” checker comes to see if you are there at least 15 minutes before official time, otherwise you’d be marked absent and not get your pay for the day.
Since my wife started doing yoga, we’ve been eating more vegetables at home and practically no meat except fish. She’s determined to become a pesco-ovo-lacto-vegetarian (someone who eats only fish, eggs, dairy and veggies), an experiment that I predict will not last four months (I failed in my own experiment with meatlessness once).
From the General Santos airport, we drove to downtown Takurong in Sultan Kudarat, where another car, our lone security escort, had been waiting for us. Trailing behind the private vehicle, we left the city, stopping by several army and police checkpoints. Whenever the road was clear, our driver shifted to high gear and I fastened [...]
Cubism, that movement in painting founded by Pablo Picasso and George Braque at the dawn of the 20th century, sought to depict objects in nature in their most basic form—as cylinder, pyramid, sphere or cube. As such, it brought art out of the box, which at that time meant a tradition of representation according to [...]
I walked into the gallery that warm summer day in Manila expecting to encounter the usual group of Bohemian-looking artists from abroad. But I was surprised to be met by eight young art and design students from a state university in Brunei, wearing tour uniforms of red polo shirts and veils for the five girls in the group.
Whoever said a revolution is not a picnic should bike or walk to Osmeña Boulevard today to see the Road Revolution, the movement that seeks to reduce pollution and traffic jams by making the streets safer and friendlier for pedestrians, runners and cyclists. And as if to declare freedom from toxicity in the city, Road [...]
We take to the streets when everything else fails. That’s how political battles are fought aboveground. And in Cebu, we take it to Osmeña Boulevard (a.k.a. Jones Boulevard). Manila has the streets of Edsa and Mendiola as the usual venues for dissent. In Cebu, the traditional battleground is Osmeña Boulevard, which stretches from Basilica Minore [...]
