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Dumaguete Diary: Day 3

It's cold and dark and when water isn't raining down on us in sheets, it hangs suspended in the air in heavy mist, the kind that gets you soaked and wets the insides of your nostrils if you stand out there for two minutes. I'm getting cabin fever but there is no way I'm stepping out into that weather. I'll teleport myself back to Dumaguete instead.

So much to choose from! Need more stomach space!
Excuse me po, are you Virgilio Adanza?

On that third and last day of my wonderful visit, I woke up at seven in the morning and jumped into a tricycle. I headed for the Dumaguete market for breakfast. Already it was so warm. I was greeted by rows and rows of small food stalls, all offering kakanins and bread of all kinds with hot chocolate made from tableas -- the real thing! I chose a stall that was fronted by a table laden with budbud. I sat down and asked for tsokolate and budbud. The man selling the budbud, let's call him Mang Virgilio, plopped two bundles down on my plate. Not sure how I was going to fit all of that into my stomach, I set to work and enjoyed the mixing of market ambience, budbud textures, and tsokolate bittersweetness.

Heavenly!

The food stall area was bustling with people cheerfully dipping pan de sal into their steaming cups of coffee or tsokolate, stopping by to pick up a bundle of budbud, or taking a break from their market errands and sitting at a stall to sip cool buko water from a freshly opened coconut. The stallholders bustled about, calling out to passersby, and trading jokes and banter across their counters.

Sto. Niño smiles beatifically over my breakfast.

I only ate three pieces of budbud and I was stuffed. I asked how much i needed to pay and Mang Virgilio asked me how many I had eaten. Surprised, I told him. He took the other bundle of budbud, still intact, and put it back on the display table and then he asked me for P40. That wasn't just a cheap breakfast -- it was priceless!

Cooking over charcoal and wood may not be environmentally-sound
(sheesh, I know, I know -- I just had to say it!)
but it certainly makes the food taste better!

The sun was higher up in the sky now and it was hot. I returned to my temporary roost to prepare myself for a visit -- no, a pilgrimage really -- to National Artist for Literature, Edith Tiempo, whom I first knew as Mom E., exacting, uncompromising yet gentle critic of my early, whimsical and childish attempts at poetry in the 1993 Dumaguete National Writers Workshop, and mother figure to many a Filipino writer.
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The Nashman said…
baket mo binalik yung brikpast! dapat inuwi mo ng baguio
6 June 2009 at 10:37
padma said…
Nash I went back for more kaso inubos ko rin lang on the way home. Hehe
6 June 2009 at 11:11
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