The Wide World of Dumaguete

The parking lot at Robinson's Mall in Dumaguete. Our time is done in Duma, so let's go with it.

Anyways, writing about stuff is inherently more interesting if it's done in the moment...which is why it sucks that I went 8 days without getting a recap in Dumaguete.

I wanted to, but something --- listening to reggae at Hayahay for too long, not having an internet connection on my computer, seeing Prince of Persia for about $2 USD, having monsoons knock out the internet/electricity when I did have a connection --- seemed to get in the way.

Oh well. Just more motivation to check in every day over my last few weeks of travel.

Anyways, it's now 9am on June 3rd and me, Logan (my travel companion for the next 4 weeks), Chris (our Dumaguete host, UW alum and Microsoft prodigy), Patrick (Chris' brother, soon to be U of Hawaii graduate, guitarist) and Dean (Chris and Patrick's dad, the man in charge at Foundation University) are on a Philippines Airlines flight from Dumaguete to Manila.

Frasier is on our inflight TV's right now. Filipinos definitely have the whole transportation entertainment thing pegged (we got to watch The Medallion and Taken on our ferry to Tagbilaran, couldn't have been happier).

Here's our group (Logan, me, Chris bending down, Patrick -- not pictured, Dean, my goatee)...

Recapping the last 8 days is probably impossible to do without 10,000 words or so. I'm just gonna get into a bunch of different parts of our experience and fill in the blanks, since recapping 8 days individually in retrospect won't work. Starting with...

FOUNDATION UNIVERSITY (aka Home Sweet Home): At Berkeley, I always wondered what Chancellor Birgeneau's house would be like, what his standard of living is. In Dumaguete, I got the Filipino equivalent. I had no idea I was actually signing up for University Administrator/Family Dynasty Fantasy Camp, though it couldn't have worked out better and life couldn't have been cooler.


I showed up my first day at the gate in the picture above after splitting up from my Boracay diving/French-Canadian buddy Francois. Chris told me to just let the guard know I was there, say his name and they would call him. This seemed odd to me at the time, but after 8 days, it seemed more than normal.

We met up that first day after lunch and he took me on a brief tour --- first stop was the library/main office...which had his family name Sinco on the door, as it was also the Museo Sinco, essentially a museum dedicated to his great grandfather (who founded FU in 1949). At this point, I started to realize the Sinco family was also a dynasty. If you wanna check out the school, here's the link: http://foundationu.com/

Today, the school is essentially run by two people --- Chris' grandma Mira (who was known to us as 'Lola,' which means grandma) and Chris' dad Dean (an architect who doubles as a tech whiz and extreme soccer coach/disciplinarian). Between the two of them, they run FU and in many ways, the entire city of Dumaguete.

For perspective, this morning, we pulled into Dumaguete Airport through some special gate, with a nod and hand-wave from Lola. Of course the guard knew who she was. And at dinner last night, she was lamenting that she doesn't go out much because "too many people recognize her." At lunch, the president of the rival Silliman University said that Dumaguete would "suffer greatly" without her. In short, she is an institution. Ditto of Dean. And we were lucky enough to be their guests.

Here's "Sir Dean" (as he's called by FU students) throwing a chair at a BBQ, aimed for some stray dogs that kept trying to eat our scraps...
Life at Foundation was pretty much the exact opposite of backpack traveling in pretty much every way. When you travel, you are constantly thinking about how you are going to be self-sufficient, get from place to place, find food, water, shelter, etc. At FU, there was nothing we had to worry about.

We always had a ride (two SUVs a few seconds from the Sinco home compound). We had aircon in our room. We had clean, made, comfortable beds. We had people in different places (anytime we talked about going somewhere, the conversation turned to "Which driver can we get to get you guys there?" and "Who do we know there?")

We always had food -- breakfast and dinner were full-spread affairs, served like clockwork. For breakfast, scrambled eggs, corned beef, bacon, endless buns, coffee, the works (and they even hooked up Logan with bagels and cream cheese for good measure). Dinner was a variety, from Chicken Curry on our first night to Panchit (traditional Filipino noodle dish kind of like Pad Thai) on our last. After every meal, we got mango, fresh off the farm mango. Best I've ever had.

And we had maids. In a lot of ways, maybe this made life almost too comfortable, since we had to get used to the concept of two live-in, working-student maids who helped us out. Obviously not an American custom, but a pretty sincerely Filipino one, Abby and Nar took care of everything for us, made our dinner and brought us our food, got us shampoo and soap, made sure our laundry was done and folded, woke us up in the morning, filled our water in our room when we left. It was bizarre at first, but you get accustomed to it fairly quickly.

And there was 'The Bell.' This was Lola's bell at the dining table, which probably got used about 6-12 times a meal, depending on stuff that went lacking. She would shake the bell and one of the girls would come in and take care of business. Again, not exactly an American custom, but after a few days, it became pretty much status quo to see. I forgot to get a good picture of Lola (or the bell), but there she is in the background (that's Chris smiling in the foreground) at the Sinco family farm and the accompanying bamboo lakehouse...

Anyways, for 8 days and about 15 meals, those comforts were our life --- great food, genuine people taking care of things for you, just overall ease, very little stress --- and life was good.

THINGS TO DO IN DUMA WHEN YOU'RE DEAD : First and foremost, Dumaguete is a college town. Granted, this still means by Filipino standards -- picture Ann Arbor or Bloomington, except with a few more shanties, a burning trash pile around every corner (the smell is awful) and replace taxis/cars with an endless stream of tricycles.

Since it's not enormous (small overall land with about 100k population), I think Chris was a little worried that we wouldn't have much to do there (which he made clear about an hour into hanging out at FU, saying "there is pretty much nothing to do here.")

But literally every day, we did something totally different, unique and fun. I'll describe every day a little bit, which ranged from (in chronological order): basketball, going to the farm/watching FU-Silliman scrimmage, indoor soccer tournament/waterfall, scuba diving, two-day trip to Bohol Island and adventure park, cave exploration. And last but not least, COCKFIGHTING. No joke. Anyways, I'll get to that shortly.

DAY 1 (Basketball):
Our first day there, me and Chris picked up Logan from the Duma Airport at around 4pm. By 7pm, we had gotten the full tour of the FU Campus (there were two parts, a main college campus and across the street, a high school/lower grades campus).

Dean (Chris' dad) took us to the HS campus where the gym/basketball court was to show us the kettlebells class they made the FU athletes do at night. Essentially its an hour long, intense workout using a tiny but extremely heavy steel ball with a handle and swinging it around for an hour. According to dean, the KGB or some Russian spies used it to train --- he was really into it.

Anyways on the walk over, we checked out the basketball court, where the FU team was practicing. Dean immediately mentioned that we could scrimmage with them if we wanted. Me and Logan hesitated, I don't think either of us wanted to step on anyone's toes (and playing against a bunch of 18- and 19-year old kids is the last thing I should do with my back, not to mention Logan had just arrived from 30 straight hours of traveling from Israel), but Dean walked over and had a chat with the head coach Cortes and after a few minutes, told us we'd be scrimmaging in 30 minutes. I thought, in Matthew McCoughney voice, "Well, alright."

By 8pm, me and Logan, with John, Neal and Arondoger were playing 5-on-5 against the next best five FU players (Cortes kicked two kids out of the game so we could play). It was pretty surreal, Logan had been in town for about 4 hours and here we were going at it, not to mention even at 8pm, it was still like 90-something degrees with insane humidity, so after about 10 minutes, adrenaline wears off and your lungs feel like that of the Marlboro man.

The FU guys weren't half bad and the opposing team ran NBA style plays (which was a little ridiculous and became a frequent complaint of Dean's, who is the de facto athletic director at FU, as well) and had some good skills, but maybe not quite as good basketball instincts as us Americans. But rather than get into a X-and-O's discussion of the game and sound like a dumb, bragging American dude, I'll just say that our side won by plenty (American 1, Philippines 0). But more importantly, we could both check off the "played basketball against a Filipino College team" off of our Bucket List. Done and done.

DAY 2 (Going to the farm/scrimmage):
In addition to being the President of FU, Lola and the Sinco family also have a number of farms located about 40 minutes north of Dumaguete. We got the full tour on the afternoon in our second day, but it's probably easiest just to describe it with pictures, so I'll lead off the next post with that.

(For the record, that's Logan in the picture above, at the farm showing off his Star of David necklace to the pigs to tell them he comes in peace. The pigs definitely appreciated the sympathy, especially since Filipinos are down with pork, which I'll get to later...)

QUICK UPDATE: It's, um, 8pm in Manila and it's just like home. There is a Santa Monica Street (I'm wearing my 5th grade SM basketball jersey from Franklin, which is getting some recognition from locals), a Pacific Palisades Condominums and... really, those are about the only similarities to home (wait, I just came up with two more: the traffic here is horrendous, way way worse than LA and everyone looks generally unhappy, kinda like LA, too).

We're staying in Malate, super over-crowded, polluted, tourist-scamming part of Manila. Really just filthy. After living in the lap of luxury, big culture shock (though our Malate Pensione hostel is really clean, tidy and friendly, so a little saving grace).

But the area is super seedy. I mean, we walked around looking for our Sharwma restaurant for an hour and we offered a combo-pack of Viagra and Cialis 6 TIMES!!! Really?? What do I need that crap for? We were probably offered cigarettes and girls 20-something times. A girl with a baby in her arms poked me and told me I was handsome. I walked away as quickly as I could. It was distressing.

Anyways, we're sitting down now in the sanctuary of this Sharwma place (finally found it) with free internet and aircon and they take credit cards, so we're probably just gonna live it up with hummus and sharwma to the max. Anything to stay away from the propositions of Manila. Check back in an hour or two....