It took his men ten months to make it through the Straits of Magellan. By the time they did, Loaisa was dead, one of his captains murdered, and twenty-five of his crew held for ransom by the Portuguese in Pernambuco.
Day: September 14, 2019
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from Doreen’s Introduction to Fruits of the Philippines (Bookmark, Inc.: Manila, 1997):
I remember gathering lemons in our farm: they were large and lumpy and not like the neat American lemons in supermarkets, but they were fragrant, and basketfuls of them made cooling lemonades. Right near these trees were aratiles, which we called seresa, low enough to climb, and almost exclusively for us children, since adults did not usually bother to gather the little berries, although they willingly ate what we shared with them.
During the Pacific war about ten families, all related, lived on the farm, and, guided by a young uncle, we children picked wild fruits called tino-tino and maria-maria, which I have not seen since then and cannot identify. The tino-tino looked like the cape gooseberry, except that it was usually not eaten raw, but sliced and fried like tomatoes. The maria-maria was delicately sweet, but where is it now? The farm never seemed to run out of guavas, which we ate green or ripe, or of nangka, also delicious both green and ripe (cooked into ginatan or eaten fresh).
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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p. 89:
- Back in Norway, as I was washing the dishes, I decided to start a publishing house.
Self entertained similar thoughts, at one time in her life.
She even had a cool name for her fantasy venture: VENDETTA PRESS.
But now, looking back, she is so glad she never tried to. Because she would have ended up with heel marks on her face. She would be having meltdowns while everyone around her would be telling her not to sweat the small stuff.
Self really regrets that she did not bring Sally Rooney’s Normal People with her to the Philippines. Because now the only thing she has to read is Silence in the Age of Noise and she’s finding it very thin, in terms of content.
But anyhoo.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 