Static Interference - Wellness Wednesday

I had a fun time visiting on the 99.5 RT 6pm to 9pm "Static Interference" show with Don Puno, Tina Ryan, and Robi Joseph last Wednesday. They're a great team - got some catchy banter going on between them. The interview bits went smoothly, though I was challenged by the first question they gave me:"what is yoga"? Such a broad question! Whenever someone asks me that I'm always a little overwhelmed by the enormity of it but I think I gave a good overview. I liked my answer to the ever-popular "what's the best style of yoga?" ... Bikram is notorious for saying that Bikram yoga is the only real yoga, everything else is just "pissing in the wind" but as much as I enjoy Bikram and think it's the best yoga foundation for me, I think (and answered) that the best style of yoga is "the one that you do consistently." I've met so many people who get great benefits from their Vinyasa practice, their Kripalu practice, their Kundalini practice, and so on - it's important to find the practice that fits for you. To even imagine that Bikram's Beginning Yoga Class is the be-all and end-all, ultimate, perfect exercise routine for everyone is sad - it's a wonderful practice, I wouldn't change a thing, but there is always room for improvement. Although I don't believe that I or anyone else - even Bikram, and he'll be the first to tell you that - could improve it at the moment, I look forward to the day when we have something so much more amazing that the Bikram series is like "pissing in the wind" by comparison.

On the show, we had fun taking questions from the listeners. No one uses the phone in Manila - it was all texts and emails. This is kind of to the chagrin of Tina, Robi, and Don, as live callers are lots of fun on the radio. Today on their show is "bitch-ass Tuesday" ... the whole show is devoted to bitching about whatever ... maybe I'll call in and bitch about how it's been almost a week and I still haven't seen any of them at yoga! (Robi was going to come at 6:30 the next morning but ended up being out til 2:30am judging a bikini competition at club Alchemy in Pasig City, poor baby.) Of course there was the obligatory "are there hot babes there?" - yes guys, there are plenty of beautiful girls in tight and/or scanty clothing at yoga - but you're going to have to work to be in their presence, as the rare guy who does try to slump through class checking out the babes while hardly working will find his ass ridden into the middle of next week by the teacher.

Towards the end of the slot, Robi and Don each tried a posture on-air with me doing the instruction/play-by-play. That was a trip. I was amazed that each of them was pretty much a natural at the posture I had them do! Robi did an amazing Triangle for no warmup and never having done the posture, and Don did Half Moon, in the backbend going back far enough that he actually touched his fingertips to the wall a step behind him - very rare for a first timer, and making for good radio as I got to both congratulate him and chide him for cheating, "ladies and gentlemen, Don has reached the wall in the backbend - and now he's leaning on it - that's cheating, Don!"

All in all, a great few hours ... we talked about doing it again, and I hope I do get to join them on the air again soon!

Warmly,
Carol

I'm going to be a guest on the radio!

Out on the town last Thursday night at the nightclub Ascend, I was introduced by my friend Henry to Don Puno, one of the DJs on local pop station 99.5 RT ("The Rhythm of the City"). He and a couple of other DJs, Robi Joseph and Tina Ryan, have a show every weeknight from 6pm to 9pm, and on Wednesdays their theme is wellness - "Wellness Wednesday". So Don invited me to come hang with him, Robi, and Tina in the studio and talk yoga and wellness tomorrow! I'm really looking forward to it - I've never been in a radio studio before, Rob's a cool guy in person and the whole group of them seem like a lot of fun from hearing them on the air. They play plenty of music - it won't be a three-hour yoga discussion, but talk of yoga interspersed with music. (And, of course, ads ... someone's got to pay the power bill, and the Philippines has some of the most expensive electricity in the world!)

99.5 RT streams live on their website: http://www.dwrt995.fm/home.html ... I hope you'll check out the show, it's from 6pm to 9pm Manila time, which, O friends in the USA, is 6am to 9am Eastern time. (On second thought, you might want to tape it with Freecorder or something.)

Another interesting thing about that night out: Before Ascend, we stopped in at a chocolate tasting on "chocolate row" at Fort Bonifacio - a cupcake place, a patisserie, and my favorite haunt Xocolat are all lined up together on Serendra street. There we met Rina Puno Avecilla, the owner and creator of the Xocolat cafes and the cousin of Don Puno. (There are some huge extended families in the Philippines. Sometimes it seems like everyone's related. It's a small world.) Rina is a woman after my own heart - her avocation is chocolate and she practices Bikram Yoga. That's a formula for happiness, as in my experience, chocolate and yoga make a great combination!

Warmly,
Carol

sexy, yoga, spa

sexy
"Sexy" is an interesting word as used in Filipino English. A much more innocent word than when used in the USA. When I first got here and Rochelle took me to the US Embassy to register, on the ride there she shared with me some experiences and peculiarities of living here. "People will say you're sexy all the time, but it just means you look nice, attractive, cute. There's no sexual undertone." And sure enough, when I was in Lavandera Mo for the first time and the ladies there were commenting on my fitness, what they said was, "you're so sexy - what do you do to keep in shape?" Then when I was having my ultrasound kidney check, the technician who was doing the ultrasound while rubbing the ultrasound sensor on my back goes, "you're so sexy!" - I've never had a medical professional say that to me, but I did not feel in the slightest that she was hitting on me, it was just the thing to say I guess. I'll be walking down the street and hear, "you're so sexy, ma'am" ("ma'am" is another common thing I hear, but as best as I can tell it's used as a translation of "po" in Tagalog, the automatic word of respect you use when addressing someone you don't know, like "kha" or "khap" in Thai). Of course, with my short hair, sometimes people mistake me for a guy and say, "Hey Joe!" or "Hello, sir!" but the "sexy" thing happens more often than the gender mixup, I'm glad to say. Trippy.

yoga
In the past week the yoga is really gelling for me. I've been teaching 10 classes a week for over a month now, practicing 3-4x a week, and really getting into the swing of it. Monday evening to Tuesday morning I found myself in a little yoga marathon - 6 classes in 24 hours, took one then taught two classes on Monday evening then taught two classes and took advanced class (for the first time since October and just the second time in over two years) Tuesday morning. It feels great to be doing so much yoga! I wasn't even that sore after advanced - and when I took another beginner's class on Wednesday evening all the soreness went away. When I teach, I'm still tending to go a couple of minutes over the 90 minutes, but gaining on time, and it's really nice to be familiar with the names of a decent number of students in my classes now. Memorizing more dialogue every day, and memorization is SO much easier when you have the opportunity to practice saying it in class day in and day out. As hung up on names as I am, I finally started making a little "seating chart" for each class, taking a few minutes in the room before each class writing down the names of the students. So if someone needs a correction I never have to worry "do I have her/his name right?" or resort to the "my friend in the yellow top" trick - which especially doesn't feel comfortable if I recognize the student but can't remember the name - I just look on my cheat sheet. All these little things add up to me being able to push the students harder and help them get deeper into their practice, which is rewarding and fun. A nice way to celebrate the 5th reunion of my teacher training class's graduation, which was the third week of March, 2004!

spa
I love spas. I am sort of a spa newbie - the first time I went to one was the Hershey's chocolate spa in Hershey, PA. My friend Amanda and wrote in my yearbook at our high school graduation that we'd stay close and do things like go to spas together, and about eight years ago when she saw that they'd opened a spa doing chocolate-themed spa treatments at the Hotel Hershey she got me to go with her (since I am a total chocoholic) for our first "spa date". It was wonderful, but I wasn't passionate enough about spa-going (especially if being slathered in chocolate wasn't part of the deal) to shell out hundreds of dollars on a regular basis for spa pampering. In fact, I didn't go to a spa again until about a year ago in the spring of 2008 when I found myself driving from Oklahoma City to Memphis and saw a town called "Hot Springs" not too far off my route in Arkansas. Being a big fan of hot tubs, I investigated and was soon enjoying my first visit to Hot Springs' Buckstaff Baths on the grounds of the very first US National Park. Being bathed in hot mineral water and having a massage there is blissful in a quirky, anachronistic way - they've been administering baths and massages there for almost 100 years. (Hot Springs is also notable for being the boyhood home of Bill Clinton - why is this not surprising to me?) I visited Buckstaff Baths again on my cross-country drive from Woods Hole, MA to Los Angeles, CA before departing for Manila, and it was just as wonderful if not more so on the second visit. (One of the several currently vacant vintage bathhouses on Bathhouse Row would make a stupendous Bikram Yoga retreat site, will someone please do this ASAP?) I've really gotten on a roll with spa-going, continuing my explorations in the US with a trip to the Olympic Spa in LA's Koreatown for the Goddess treatment. Yeah, it's all that - I truly felt like a goddess after the four-hour bathing, sauna, body scrub, and massage-fest that is the Goddess treatment! I love the combination of the cold plunge pool and the super-hot herbal pool, and it's a steal by American price standards. But Manila's spa scene is the best! There's our student Vicki Aldaba's serene, luxurious Spa 6750 at the Greenbelt mall complex, where I enjoyed a complimentary signature massage as a welcome gift, I have since experienced my first-ever hot stone massage and I intend to sample many more treatments - though at $50 - $60 for a 90-minute session it is one of the more expensive spas in town. I'm looking forward to trying the 24-hour Wensha spa ... even though I'm having trouble finding it, the round-the-clock schedule, affordable rates, and the cold plunge pool are very appealing. I've enjoyed the hot tub and a Thai massage at one of the six branches of The Spa - the one at The Fort by Market! Market! - and if there weren't such an amazing variety of spas around I'd be tempted to become a member of The Spa. Just this week, on Tuesday after practicing Advanced class, I had a hot basalt "bath" at Ganban Bedrock Spa & Oxygen Bar, a concept imported from Japan where you lie on heated volcanic basalt for 15 minutes at a time, interspersed with 15 minutes in an amazing Japanese massage lounger and then 15 minutes breathing oxygen (a nice change from the less-than-pristine Manila air). Lying on the basalt is unbelievably HOT, but then, I'm a Bikram yogi, I can handle the heat! Spas are the best. I think I'm rapidly outgrowing my "newbie-spagoer" status, and for the opportunity to do that I'm truly grateful!

Warmly,
Carol

my pad

Many of my friends have asked me about my apartment here in Manila. I've posted some pictures on Picasa for folks to peruse and enjoy.

Warmly,
Carol

The Woman Who Had Two Brains

I finished reading The Woman Who Had Two Navels this week, and really enjoyed it. I've read and learned a little about Filipino history ... about how Spain controlled the Philippines for centuries until 1898, until the Spanish-American War when America brought the Philippines "Independence" from the Spanish and then proceeded to occupy it until World War II. The American presence was initially not at all welcome and the Spanish-American War was followed by the Philippine-American war from 1899 to 1902 officially with resistance continuing until 1913. After 1913, many survivors of the defeated resistance went into exile, and the Filipino people settled into an acceptance of American presence whereby the American influence on the country grew very strong, English replaced Spanish as the dominant Western language and the language of business and the arts, and Americans were generally more appreciated than resented. America failed to protect the Philippines from takeover and brutal occupation by the Japanese during World War II, but after the defeat of the Japanese when American soldiers returned to a shattered Manila they were celebrated as liberators. The Woman Who Had Two Navels takes place against this backdrop of history, as Filipinos of multiple generations, some exiles, some born in exile in Hong Kong, and some visiting Hong Kong from Manila, interact in a tangled web of present (1950s) events, flashbacks to the Manilas of "Independence" through the 50's, love, denial, shattered dreams, and transformation. Joaquin's writing is beautiful and complex, so that it's the kind of novel where you have to mark every word and pay careful attention to each strand of plot, and you're rewarded when the whole thing comes into focus as the strands converge at the end.

While I was reading The Woman Who Had Two Navels, my Balikbayan Box finally arrived from the US! In it I had packed a book I got for Christmas and knew I wouldn't have time to read before I got to Manila, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. I do want to continue my Filipino literary explorations by reading Philippine National Hero José Rizal's Noli me Tangere, but I knew I had to read My Stroke of Insight first when, a couple of days before my box arrived, my friend Charlie was raving about it. In all the excitement of the past couple of months, I'd forgotten that I actually owned the book and that it was on its way to me in the long-awaited box, so I was totally delighted to find it the first thing looking up at me from the top of the pile when I finally got to open the box. I've had Filipino friends tell me the only way they got through Noli Me Tangere was by using the local equivalent of Cliff's Notes, so I was grateful to find My Stroke of Insight to be a much easier read than the book I read before it. I'm a biologist by education and this was a book presenting a lot of brain science to the average non-scientist. So reading about a familiar subject that was so carefully and clearly presented as to be accessible to someone with no scientific background was a lovely breeze after the challenging (and thrilling) work of deciphering the mysteries of The Woman Who Had Two Navels. And what wonderful experiences and ideas conveyed so clearly! Jill Taylor is a brain scientist who had a massive stroke that wiped out most of the function of her left brain, and who recovered fully over the course of eight years. What happened to her when she had the stroke is that she lost her ability to (among other things) speak or understand (or even think in) verbal language, read, walk, and conceptualize the future and past. All that remained was her right-brain consciousness, the in-the-moment sensory stream for which, without judgment, categorization, or prioritization, we are literally one with the universe. Over the course of her recovery, she was able to observe as the logical, analytical, ego-based structures of her left brain regenerated. I often wonder why I simultaneously feel "one with the universe" and "self-interested and totally separate." Instinctively I've been accepting of this in myself, but I was a lot more confused by it until I read Jill's book. The idea that seems so much simpler and clearer thanks to the experience she's shared is that the ego lives in the left brain. It's what makes us, as humans, able to do all the amazing, analytical, logical, historiographical and strategic stuff we do - but it's just a construct. Why let it convince us that its reality is the only reality, or that we're not good enough, or not lovable, or that we need to kill that person who's going to take our dinner or who doesn't agree with us, etc., etc.? Jill's story and her message are beautiful, inspiring, and hopeful. I'm so glad I read this book - it's such an important issue in my life, finding a balance between individuality and universality, and My Stroke of Insight fills in huge swaths of the roadmap to finding that balance. To see Jill talk about her experience, check out the link to her talk at the 2008 TED conference on her website, http://www.mystrokeofinsight.com/. Her speaking schedule and lots of other cool stuff I'll be checking out soon are on that site, too.

Warmly,
Carol

knowing when - and when not - to listen to ourselves

I was teaching this morning and when we got to the 2-minute Savasana after the standing series, a student left to go to the bathroom. Didn't I see the same student leaving just a class or two ago? As she left I said, "are you in the habit of leaving the room during class?" "No!" she assured me, so as she went out the door I said, "good, well, don't get into it!" In the moment I told the class after she left, "if you absolutely have to leave, we're not going to stop you from going outside the room. But remember that even though your mind is telling you that the best thing for you is to get out of the room, that's the same mind that would also like to convince you that shooting heroin is a good idea." If you tried it, I meant - from what I hear about heroin, it's love at first hit - which is why I don't intend to try it. I think they got that. Anyway, the exchange got me thinking about all the self-defeating crap our minds try to get us to do, mine in particular (it being the only one I know from the inside). Not that it's worth beating myself up for this, such behavior is how we're taught to survive in the stressful society around us. Tendencies toward allowing ourselves to be governed by fear of scarcity and violent ends are probably also adaptive to evolving in a world of meager resources and abundant predators - the "nasty, brutish, and short" life of ages past (though sometimes I wonder if life isn't nastier and more brutish if not shorter in the common era than before). Interesting though that fear can be such an illusion ... I've left the room a few times when I thought I was going to die if I didn't, but even after years of practice I can still get to that "get me the heck out of here now" panicky place (one of the great things about Bikram Yoga is that that edge is always accessible if you work for it) and more times than not I've hung tough in the room. Guess what? I'm not dead. I always feel kind of silly after bailing, but hey, practice not perfection. And the next time I'm freaked out by something else that in the moment seems cataclysmic - that I got cut off in traffic, that I'll never amount to anything, that the economy is going to grind to a screeching halt, whatever it is - I'll practice hanging tough, taking a deep breath, and until maybe once someday when I'm wrong, it's not gonna kill me.

Warmly,
Carol

teaching over a thousand drummers

This afternoon I taught at the Quezon City studio, which is on the top floor of a 5-story mall complex. Right as class began, a torrential downpour began. The kind of rain where if you look at the street, what's usually black asphalt looks white with all the spray of the rain pelting down on it. Whatever the roof of this building is, it has drum-like properties. So I started teaching the class yelling over the kind of racket you would imagine hearing if Neil Peart and John Bonham were soloing and trying to drown each other out. Great fun! Got to use my projection abilities to their fullest. Thank goodness it stopped after about half an hour - Ryan, who's been teaching there for over a year and was in class, tells me that sometimes during the rainy season it's like that through the entire class. Yikes. I was recording the class on my iPod to listen to it later, but I think I'll let that one go. I recorded my class on Sunday morning and took it Sunday afternoon before teaching the late afternoon class. I'd never taken my own class before. Not bad, but I mix up my rights and lefts far more than I thought - I'll have to be more careful about that.

Tomorrow I teach at 6:30am, so it's time for bed!
Warmly,
Carol

The Woman Who Had Two Kidneys

I'm so glad I struck up a conversation on the metro (MRT) with a woman who was reading the novel I'm now reading. I was on the MRT EDSA line going from Makati to Quezon City to teach my weekly pair of classes at the studio there, it was crowded as usual and I was standing holding the rail. I noticed that the woman sitting in front of me was absolutely rapt with attention reading this novel, which I could see from the title heading at the top of the pages was called The Woman Who Had Two Navels. Intriguing title - what's that about, I thought? Books that allow people to escape into them from the hustle and bustle of the subway I often find are worth reading. I greatly enjoyed the Harry Potter books and Memoirs of a Geisha after seeing people wrapped up in them on the T in Boston, and the Twilight series is on my "to read" list for the same reason. So when the woman looked up to readjust when the person next to her got off the train, I asked her about it. She informed me that not only was it a terrific read but the author was Nick Joaquin, one of the great Philippine national authors and I wrote that down so I could pick it up at the bookstore. What a great book ... love stories intertwining against a backdrop of Manila from the early 1900s through the post-WWII era, from the anti-US resistance in the early 1900s through the exile of some in Hong Kong and the general warming of most to US occupation pre-WWII and the post-WWII rebuilding. I wish Lola were here so I could talk with her about it - she was born in Cebu just a few years after the plot began.

So I've been reading this book for a few days ... reading before I go to sleep, carrying it in my purse, I'll stop in a coffee shop and read some, I brought it in with me to read while soaking in the hot tub when I treated myself to a Thai massage at The Spa on Bonifacio High St. (the Santa Monica-like promenade near Market! Market!), and I'm about halfway through.

Yesterday after teaching the 6:30am and 9:00am classes I decided to act on the realization that's been becoming clear to me over the past week that I've lately been doing too much yoga and not enough other physical activity for my body. For some people, the more yoga the better, but for me, I need a balance. Bikram says that yoga is like flushing the toilet, the rest of the things you do in your life fill your body with waste and yoga flushes it out. I find that if I do too much yoga without mixing it up with running, cycling, rollerblading, hiking, swimming, vinyasa (which I enjoy but which feels more like a straight workout to me than the healing workout of Bikram), etc. it can feel a little like I'm a toilet that's stuck on, continuously flushing, wasting energy like a stuck toilet wasting water. So I decided to go for a long walk. At the awesome bookstore on High St., Fully Booked, where I picked up The Woman Who Had Two Navels, I had also picked up Silvia's Book: An Expat's Guide to Living in Manila, which a student told me about when I asked her how she heard about Bikram Yoga Manila (we're featured in the book). One of the tips in there is that at the top of the Shangri-La Mall, there's an aromatherapy/essential oil kiosk that sells this stuff called Citrimint, which is great for repelling ants and other bugs. I've noticed a growing population of little tiny ants in my apartment over the couple of weeks I've been here, and when I'd gotten home from teaching in the morning my bathroom sink had a half-dozen little ants wandering around in it, crawling in and out of the drain.

So I decided to make the trek to the mall. I put on my hiking boots and some sunscreen, grabbed my sunbrella and headed out on a six-kilometer walk up Makati Ave, over the bridge to Mandaluyong City, through Barangka Ibaba (the southeast corner of Mandaluyong City), over to EDSA and up to the mall. It reminded me of walking around Lahug, Lola's neighborhood in Cebu - in Makati there are foreigners everywhere, but Barangka Ibaba is a much quieter, middle-class (is my guess, though there was a range of housing types from quite extravagant to quite modest) neighborhood that is pretty much exclusively Filipino.

When I got to the mall area, by the Shaw Boulevard station of the MRT, I was looking at my map and, having noted where the mall was a week or so prior, I'd forgotten that it was the Shangri-La mall I was looking for, I thought it was the SM Megamall. I'm still getting used to the crazy abundance of malls here, though I hear I have to check out Hong Kong, where the whole city is like one enormous interconnected mall where you can end up not going outside for weeks at a time. So I went up to the top of SM Megamall and there weren't any kiosks there. Then I double-checked the note I'd written myself about it the previous week and, oops, I was supposed to be looking in Shangri-La Mall. Duh. I was standing in front of an ultrasound clinic. It occurred to me that in the Philippines, it probably wouldn't cost hundreds of dollars to have an ultrasound done to see if I have both of my kidneys. I have wondered about this for a long time because my mother only has one. Riding a motorcycle, fun as it is, is risky I know, and if you only have one kidney it's pretty darn stupid. (So is riding a motorcycle in Manila, don't worry, I'm not that crazy. Motorcycling in the USA where right-of-way is determined by traffic laws, not intimidation, is enough for me!) So I've been meaning to find out about the kidney thing. I went in to the clinic and they told me that they only do prenatal ultrasounds, but the SM Megaclinic a few doors down would do a kidney ultrasound, probably for about P1000. And sure enough, I was able to have one done for P1089 ($22.50)! So now I know that I have two healthy-looking kidneys with no stones or cysts.

I did get the Citrimint at Shangri-La Mall (P200 for the oil and P180 for an oil diffuser candle lamp set), and today as I write this after diffusing some Citrimint yesterday evening before heading out to dinner with some yoga friends, there is not an ant to be seen in my apartment.

Warmly,
Carol

teaching

I've been here three weeks and one day, and I've taught roughly 28 classes so far. 10 classes a week, mostly back-to-back doubles, and I'm getting the hang of teaching once again. I've got a ways to go before I know the dialogue cold (which will be a first) and before I'm fully comfortable with timing, but it feels like things are coming together. Part of being comfortable with teaching (as with just about everything else) is accepting the inability to control everything. So many factors go into the fabric of a class, all we can do is teachers is guide the flow. We are vital to the class yet our role is nothing away from the students, the postures, the heat, the infinite multitude of air currents, car horns, even the puddles of sweat collecting on the floor.

Something I keep learning again and again is the importance of letting go of a minute detail for the sake of the overall flow of the class - even though I am doing everything I can to help the students focus and understand as many details as possible. The relatively new student today who was sitting out of fixed firm pose in first set - the student didn't seem to know how to get into the posture without major prodding and special correction from me, but I hung on to the idea of making the corrections (without actually biting the bullet and making them) to my distraction from teaching the full posture to the rest of the class. When I realized what was happening I realized it was time to end the posture anyway. So I explained to the sitting-out student how to get into the setup during savasana between sets, and then was able to focus on teaching the posture with my full attention in the second set. In the next posture, half tortoise, when the same thing happened, I was able to let go of the student getting in at all in the first set, and teach both sets with my attention more broadly distributed among all the students. It can be satisfying as a teacher to have all the students doing every posture, moving together, flowing together, but to be attached to that ideal as a measure of our success is to deny the individuality of our students and the intensity of a yoga series that is designed to push students to edges where they come up against their limits - sometimes knocking their wind out or preventing them from riding the wave of the group's motion.

As for the dialogue, I keep rereading and rememorizing postures. Our students who are going to training in two months are an inspiration - the better dialogue I use, the more they will have the dialogue burned into their brains. So I am trying especially hard with the first few postures in the series so that they'll have as strong as possible a grip on those early postures. I find myself reading the dialogue like a series of prose poems. To really get it emblazoned in my mind, I have to do more than just understanding each posture's basic structure and trajectory, looking for the internal rhymes, finding the rhythm of the phrases. Sometimes the lines are obviously poetic and roll gracefully out of my brain, "nice and loose, comfortable, easy, flexible." The poetry is there throughout, however, and the more I can find it and understand how it applies to the posture, the more I will feel ownership of the dialogue.

OK, bedtime. Don't forget to drink lots of water!!
Warmly, Carol

A fun night out in a hip new bar in a super swank part of town

Well, I should probably be sleeping, but as I am jazzed from a fun time my first night out on the town in Manila, why not share the experience with you instead? I'm not teaching until 6pm tomorrow, so the night is young!

So my friend Maureen, who practices at BYM, is a creative director at Philippine Tatler magazine, and her boss is a partner in a sweet new bar called Establishment. Tonight was the "soft opening," and it was a blast. I'm glad I decked myself out in the sexy new purple dress I got last week and my big clunky yellow patent leather platform sandals, as I felt barely dressy enough as it was amidst the fun-and-well-heeled crowd. Between Maureen's boss and his partners, they seem to know all of Manila's see-and-be-seen crowd who showed up to christen the place till the wee hours of Tuesday morning. Not that I recognized any of these folks, but Maureen, her friends, and folks I met there pointed out CEOs, politicians, fashion models, etc. etc.. What was particularly nice was the combination of swankiness and friendliness ... an A-list crowd that was friendly and mingly (maybe all such crowds are like that, in my limited experience I wouldn't know, but I suspect it has a lot to do with the friendly, mingly Filipino culture), yummy cocktails, and gorgeous design. Upon walking in, the entry bar was decorated with a velvety/damasky black wallpaper accented by elegant white flowers. The main bar/dining area with its triple-height ceiling had big, comfy chairs, some arrayed around low coffee-table like tables and others around more traditional dining tables and a dramatic black geometric, tree branch-inspired pattern against light walls. Overall, the light was not-too-dark, not-too-bright in the restaurant and the bathroom was more generously lit and mirror-lined so as to afford us fabulous babes the necessary light to tweak our lip gloss and such. I had a great time hanging with Maureen and her friends, some from work, many from around town, and I really hope her co-workers are able to hook me up with a gig writing a column about exploring Filipino food!

Establishment is located at The Fort, a hyperdeveloped area just outside Makati City in Taguig City. Apparently it used to be US Military land, and was turned back over to the Philippines within the last decade or two. Since then the area has been the site of major, no-expense-spared development, 21st-century style. Enormous glass-curtain-walled luxury condo towers, an impeccably-landscaped, designer boutique-lined pedestrian mall, and a fun mall with interesting bazaar sections called "Market! Market!". I am not a stranger to Market! Market! ... after learning from an American friend that you can actually buy tampons there (tampons are not very popular in the Philippines - fortunately I remembered their scarcity from my visits to Cebu in 1998 and 2000 and came equipped with a six-month supply) I decided to head over and check it out last week. Locals don't seem to like to walk much here, but I love walking and the walk to The Fort area being an extremely safe-looking walk I decided to hoof it for the roughly 3-miles from my neighborhood, Salcedo Village. So I schlepped down there and after a long walk down the parkway-like McKinley Road the whole dazzling development shimmered before me like an oasis in the desert. Very incongruous - it was a bit like encountering Las Vegas for the first time, though without the neon, just lots of clean, shiny, new buildings and carefully planned public spaces. It was a little disappointing actually when I got my first glimpse of The Fort development. I had somehow been expecting a rowdy, farmer's market kind of atmosphere and this was too hypermodern, almost too clean and shiny, and yet every here and there undeveloped parking lots were covered in a depressing gravel like miniature scree. I got into the pedestrian mall and matters initially seemed worse - had I traveled all the way around the world to visit a replica of the Santa Monica 3rd Street Promenade, complete with a Lush, a cupcake bakery, and a Starbucks every few hundred meters? My mood was brightened when I found Xocolat, a chocolate cafe next door to the cupcake place that serves Burdick-like hot chocolate as well as churros con chocolat (pictured). I remembered that I actually LIKE the Santa Monica 3rd Street Promenade, touristy though it may be, and hey, this version has killer chocolate! Then at the end of it, I found my bazaar -Market! Market! is indeed a blast. Maybe a little like Pike Place Market in Seattle. It has a permanent farmer's market featuring fresh produce, carts selling local specialties from all the major regions of the Philippines, and kiosks selling local delights like bibingka, schwarma, balut (no I haven't tried it yet), empanadas, and more. It also has a five-story mall with not just the usual stores but three warrens of bargain booths named the Gift Market!, the Fashion Market! and the Furniture Market!. I couldn't resist picking up the the abovementioned purple dress, the cutest boatneck purple shirt with a 1" border silver sequins at the neck for P350 (haggled down from P380, I'm sure I'll get better at that...) and ribbon-belted plaid shorts in navy and pink for P200/pair. Then in the mall, I found a white elephant I've been looking for for ever, and with the best twist. I have wanted a polo shirt dress for the longest time but have never quite found the right combination of of sleeve dimensions, length, tailoring etc that did it for me. But I found my dress at a boutique in Market! Market!, and instead of a horse, sheep, alligator or some other overplayed emblem (sorry polo-wearing friends) on the chest it had a huge embroidered map of the Philippines! Such fun!

Home from the party tonight at 1:45pm I took a cab with one of Maureen's friends (ok, my friend now too) who lives in my building... but the first time I came home from Market! Market! I took a Jeepney.

Warmly,
Carol