First Day

The only shoes I brought to the Philippines.

On Wednesday morning I had the hotel’s complimentary breakfast with JC and my Dad, which consisted of garlic rice (fried rice with garlic), scrambled eggs, and sausages. Looking out the windows of the dining room, I got my first daylight view of the Philippines. I saw mostly modern skyscrapers (hotels mostly), and farther away, small villages consisting of corrugated shanty towns and concrete city blocks.
Makati Panorama from Fraser Patio

CNN blared in the background, and the staff was super courteous and eager to please. It was a good start.
Frasier Dining Area

First Trip to Adelina
Later JC and I were picked up by my cousin Boy, his second oldest son J.L., and Memeng (sp?), my Dad’s childhood friend. They were to drive us to Adelina, a street in Manila where my Dad grew up and where most of the Jusay family still lives. Memeng, like Boy, is a cab driver, and only he could pick us up at that hour since only cabs and certain vehicles are allowed in Makati before 7pm since traffic is so bad. I vaguely recognized Boy from old photos, but the Jusay resemblance was definitely there. He actually kinda looks like Kurt Vonnegut.

Cuya Boy and Kurt Vonnegut - Separated at Birth?

He was a star tennis player when he was younger (he’s in his early 40s), but drives a cab now to pay the bills. J.L. is a happy 19-20 year old college kid (everybody’s ages get kinda vague here) with a huge smile and, like his two brothers, a talent for basketball.

Adelina, a place I remembered mostly from old pictures, seemed smaller, more cluttered with advertising (there were flags urging people to drink RC Cola strung from overhanging wires across the whole block), but the shape of the buildings and the way they were set up seemed very familiar. My first mistake was greeting my Uncle Bening (my Dad’s brother) – everyone calls him Papa Bening, since a lot of the Jusays there are his kids – with just a handshake upon arriving. What I should have done was take his hand and place it on my forehead, what they call giving a person your blessing, which is a sign of respect for people who are elderly. I realized my mistake only moments after I had made it, and I think I have yet to make it up to him (it’s more than a week later as I write this). Papa Bening looks like an older, quieter version of my Dad, and he too has blueish eyes.

The Blue Eye Mystery
For some mysterious reason, JC was the first person to realize in the whole Jusay family that my Dad has blue eyes. He had arrived in the Philippines before me, and while he and Dad were standing in the sunlight, JC looked at his eyes and noticed they were a greyish blue. Of course, JC spazzed out, and my Dad responded, ‘You knew me for 30 years and you didn’t know the color of my eyes?!?’

Apparently, my Dad, Papa Bening, and Daddy Gerry (the second oldest brother, he passed away not too long ago) all had blue eyes. Kids used to tease them while growing up by calling them mestizo (mixed). I think my Dad must’ve been embarrassed. Whatever the case, this was a new discovery for everyone, including my cousin Robert and Ate Nerie. Weird.

Street Basketball
The inside of Nerie’s house looked much like I remembered it from the first time in ’78. Concrete walls, narrow layout, ominous wooden stairs leading two flights up. Jusays also owned the next two houses down. Inside I met Robert, whose kids were still sleeping upstairs, and Boy’s two other boys, B.J. (oldest), and J.J. (youngest), who both had the same big smiles as J.L., and both were basketball fanatics. I liked them instantly. I then met their mother, Baby, a very affectionate, loving woman with a raspy voice, who encouraged me to join her boys in some street basketball down the block. And this was where I realized my second mistake: not bringing my camera for fear of it being stolen or lost. Intimidated, I stood aside while I watched Boy’s sons play street ball with some other kids on the block. Everyone wore flip flops and the ball was half-regulation size, and everyone was fast. One kid even wore just one flip flop on one foot (I think he broke the other slipper halfway through the game). Behind the rusted basketball hoop was an empty lot with weeds and junk, and behind that, a three-story apartment building with clothes hanging from lines. About a yard away was a group of people playing dominoes on fold-up tables. It seemed like a perfect setup for a photo shoot. I vowed to bring my camera the next time. (Unfortunately, I never actually did take a picture of the street basketball court.)

Robert and Family
Later, JC and I reunited with Robert’s wife Gaye and their three kids, Joshua, Janina, and Julia (all J’s, too), who we hadn’t seen since Thanksgiving. The kids are a bundle of laughs and always remind us of how we were when we were their age.

Joy
Joy then arrived in her Pajero SUV, and we met for the first time. I had conversed with her so many times through Joe’s webcam and over the phone that it didn’t really feel like a first meeting, but it was nice to finally meet her in person. We then all went to Glorietta mall because I wanted to get a generic camera strap for my Digital Rebel (the included strap says CANON DIGITAL EOS in huge letters which just screams out STEAL ME), which proved to be a fruitless search, but it was nice to hang out with everybody, including the kids. It was also nice to see how Joy got along with everybody. She was already a part of the family (made sense since her brother had married Kat a year earlier). I also wanted to buy a copy of Liwayway, reputedly the oldest running comic book magazine in the Philippines, but I had forgotten the name of it, and Henry wasn’t really a comic book fan. (I later learned from Cess, Emil’s wife, that it had long been out of business, and that it wasn’t really comics – more prose with illustrations ala Saturday Evening Post.)

Welcoming Party
Later that night we all met back at Fraser Place to have a party for my arrival. In the pictures, I am wearing a red St. Theresa basketball shirt, which I borrowed from JC. My luggage had still not arrived.

Seated: Baby, me, and J.L. Behind: Joy (Joe’s fiance), Nerie (looking at me), and Robert
Jusays looking at old photos.

Joshua, me, Joy, Baby, B.J. (Baby’s oldest)
My Arrival Party at Fraser Hotel

J.J. (Baby’s youngest), Joshua (Robert’s oldest), Julia (Robert’s youngest), Kat, and Cuya Jessie (Kat’s dad)
My Arrival Party at Fraser Hotel - Kids

Empenadas (middle), roasted chicken, cinagong (pork stew), and broccoli (lumpia – meat spring rolls – and more cinagong in the back)
My Arrival Party at Fraser Hotel - Food

Me whipping out the Tablet PC (Janina is the rapt, little girl on my left – she’s the budding artist in Robert’s family)
My Arrival Party at Fraser Hotel - Tablet PC

JC making some joke about my Tablet PC
My Arrival Party at Fraser Hotel - Tablet PC II

Meeting Emil
It was also at this party where I met my cousin Emil (only son of Daddy Gerry) for the first time and his wife Cess. Emil works as a computer programmer, and he and I chatted tech for a bit. He had actually contacted me out of the blue several years ago when he tried to register the domain name for jusay.com and found my website instead. He wore a Buffy t-shirt and I heard he was into comics, so I liked him instantly.

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