Travel Time

Four months have gone by since I blogged about any particular rant or food craving. My blogging thoughts suddenly gone frozen due to mental lapses and stressful thoughts bothering me the past months. Now, I am gradually adjusting to another unfamiliar phase which is albeit uncertain, but more challenging in a lot of ways. The past months allowed me to seclude myself from good food and the usual comfort of familiar food in a foreign land, yet that experience also provided me moments to appreciate and savor the local gastronomy here in the Philippines. From barbecued chickens, roasted pigs, fusion cuisine and regional specialties as well - that where my cherished culinary encounters.

  

I have been invited as far as Cagayan de Oro to conduct a series of trainings in a place called Balingasag, a town in Misamis Oriental. The place is relatively remote, as I could compare it to a far flung barrio in the city where I came from. Trips from Cagayan de Oro would only take  45 minutes travel time. I may compare it to the typical hispanic setting of old cities where the school, plaza, municipal office and the church are adjacent to each other.

Balingasag's townscape is comparable to  Vigan in Ilocos Sur where old houses of antiquity still stand erect and preserved amidst the passage of time. A newly renovated plaza situated at the middle speaks of the progress the place is taking up. These old houses now exists not as museums nor heritage sites but are just transformed into modern beer houses, restaurants and stores by its existing owners. How I wish that the local government of this place will take bolder steps to consolidate with the National Historical Institute and lobby for the preservation of these houses whose architectural features are truly impressive.

Not only is this place rich with its historical artifacts, but it is a place blessed with the bountiful harvest of the soil. The place produces the best rice grains in the country with its features close to sinandomeng or jasmine, but only marketed within the locality itself. The problem according to the farmers is that they do not receive help from the government in sustaining their produce. As much as they want to increase production, they do not have the right resources and finances to sell their produce in the bigger markets.

Crops  and other vegetables grow abundantly in this fertile place proving true that Mindanao is indeed the food basket of the country.  Apart from the crops, Balingasag is also known to be one of Mindanao's top bangus producers as this is celebrated every year through the Bangus Festival.

 

The place is largely Christian in faith.The old church take pride with its maroon brick finished exterior and a simple interior speaking of the simplicity of the locals and how they managed to put up a church that embodies the culture and the lifestyle of its own. Strolling around the city riding a pedicab, I took a few a  moments to marvel at this amazing structures that make up the vignettes of our history as a people. If only this structures would speak, it would tell this far more advanced world that we live in, of the beauty that lies in the simplicity of the past and how life was indeed truly worth remembering. As an old passage teaches us - Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures, kill nothing but time!