The day we arrived to Dumaguete in January, the tricycle drivers were ending a strike which protested a fare reduction from nine pesos to six. (The local transportation commission had claimed lower fuel costs warranted lower fares.) Though the strike didn’t last long—or result in an official return to the higher fare—I've observed that people who can pay the nine pesos, usually do. To travel from our house to the center of Dumaguete, about two kilometers, costs about Php20, or about 50 U.S. cents.

 The most distinctive design element of the tricycles, though not at all surprising in this very Catholic country, is the frequency of religious blessings or invocations painted boldly on the top of their carriages. These messages most often ask for blessings from God or Jesus, St. Catherine or St. Anthony. A very common invocation is to Señor Santo Niño or abbreviated as Sr. Sto. Niño, which means Revered Holy Child and refers to the child Jesus icon that Magellan is said to have given the Filipinos when he landed in Cebu in 1521. By far the most common tricycle message that riders travel under is the ecumenical “God Bless Our Way." 

About a quarter of the tricycles leave out the religious messaging, but paint their family or company name on the tricycle. I’ve managed to find only a handful of tricycles that vary from these two designs.  L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics has a tricycle emblazoned with its Website (no comment). I love “The Rock” tricycle design and have spotted him a few times. Two tricycles have banners that seem original, if maybe just a little subversive given the context: “The Power of You” and “One World is Enough, a Wise Man Said.” A third says on top, "So What?" and then answers below, "Oh Yeah..." The ellipsis seems crucial here. Another tricycle I’ve spotted twice, but failed to record in a photo, announces itself boldly: “I Don’t Know!” I'm not sure if the driver is trying to throw shade  (I hope I'm using that term correctly) on Dumaguete's believers or if the driver is just wryly warning passengers of his geographic limitations. Below the passenger window on the front of the tricycle, a panel reads: “Cheap Ride.” 

My all-time favorite Dumaguete tricycle banner was spotted only once a couple weeks ago, and unfortunately, I didn’t capture it on camera. (I’m beginning to suspect this tricycle was a day-tripper from another town.) The tricycle says, very directly, “Sad but True.” Is this a warning to passengers about the ride if they climb aboard? Or maybe he's just making an honest statement that, unfortunately, could apply to too many things in this life.

They are everywhere, the street dogs of the Philippines. 

As in most developing countries in the world, free-range dogs are a part of the Filipino ecology. Wherever there are humans, there are dogs. While some Filipinos have dogs as house pets, these dogs roam without fences, collars, ID tags, or leashes. Some of these dogs may actually have a human or a home to go to for food and shelter, but many don't and just wander neighborhoods eating scavenged scraps. Most are not neutered or spayed. Some have buddies and run in pairs or small packs, some have a momentary mate or are trying to get one--and lose the annoying third wheel. But most are just hanging out by themselves. In Tagalog, they’re called askals, a combination of aso (dog) and kalye (street), though the politically correct term is aspins (combining words for dog and Pinoy). The Cebuanos call them irong Bisayas, Visayan dogs.

Because of all the cross-breeding, most tend to be medium-sized, short-haired with pointy ears and nose, though these traits, like the colors of their coats, vary too. In temperament, they are most similar: easy-going and chill. Most appear to be quite healthy--no doubt a testament to their richly mixed genetics. Every so often, though, I spot a thin, malnourished aspin, or a sickly one with bare patches of skin. Obviously all could use a routine vet check-up, but most get by.

What I like most about these Pinoy dogs on the street, in the shade on the beach, running down the side of the road, laying on the floor of the local shop, digging in the garbage, is that every single one has a fully realized sense of dog. They are free dogs. There's no cooped-up, anxious barking, no fidgety gait when they walk. No over-fed, under-exercised lethargy in these dogs. They’re scrappy, sometimes tough, sometimes crotchety or adorably old. All are contentedly, completely dog.

I’m reading an amazing collection of essays by a historian of prehispanic Philippines, William Henry Scott. He did ground-breaking historical work to uncover the lives of Filipinos before the Spanish colonizers arrived in the 16th century. Through analyzing dictionaries recorded by Spaniards of the indigenous languages, Scott makes many cultural insights that were otherwise destroyed by the Spanish or lost over the centuries. And Scott's writing is sharp and lively--a rarity, unfortunately, for historians. Among the Visayans*, for whom we have no primary record of stories or poetry, the dictionaries** reveal aspects of how language might have been used in poetry and storytelling. The Visayans' oral literature was sophisticated, according to Scott. In one of my favorite passages, Scott notes that the Visayans had completely separate words for everyday things when they were annoyed or angry. Scott writes:

• "There is no evidence of any prose literature, but ordinary Visayan speech was itself rich with metaphor and colorful imagery, and their poetry must have been even more so. A high proportion of the dictionary terms have both a literal and figurative meaning, and a wide selection of pejorative terms to apply to common objects when angry. Men, women and children are referred to by the name of birds and animals they resemble in appearance or behavior. Or trees and baskets whose shapes they share. The well-dressed are like the brilliant kankanog butterfly, the red-faced like dapdap blossoms, and a timawa commoner who is treated like a datu [elite] is timinduk—a big banana. Conversely, kusi parrots come in three kinds: the little green ones are slaves, green ones with red breasts are timawa, and the real beauties with red and green plumage all over are datos. Somebody who is articulate and talkative is likened to luxuriant foliage, while one who speaks ill of his own relatives is like a big bat—because these creatures are believed to defecate in their own face when hanging upside-down. … One who buckles down and overcomes some difficulty is a guhuk, digging stick, the Visayan equivalent of a plow. Finally, a tired oarsman calls his oar a kabkab when irritated—the heart-shaped leaf of the malu-ibon vine—and a cat is called musakany or mosaraw in such sentence as “Damned cat stole my food again!”

from Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino: and Other Essays in Philippine History by William Henry Scott. Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1992.

* The Visayans (or Bisayans) are the people who live in the central islands of the Philippines, including the islands of Samar, Leyte, and Cebu, where Ferdinand Magellan landed in 1521. Cebu is also the site where Miguel Lopez de Legazpi arrived in 1565 to establish the first Spanish settlement, which led to the colonization of the Philippines by Spain.

**Alonzo Mentrida's 1637 Diccionario de la Lengua Bisaya, Hiligueina y Haraya de la Isla de Panai and Mateo Sanchez's Vocabulario de la Lengua Bisaya written in Dagami, Leyte between 1615 and 1618.

Forget the angel cloud pillow soft euphemisms for toilet paper in the Philippines, one brand gets right to the point:

Which, of course, is the very situation that any international traveler needs to attend to soon after arrival. For my readers in the United States, let’s just say, if you come to visit our home here, you wouldn’t need to make any adjustments to your usual bathroom practices. We have toilet paper and the requisite plumbing that lets you flush. 

However, should you need to go to a “comfort station” in a public place, that’s a whole other matter. Some restaurants that cater to a lot of foreigners have “bathroom tissue,” but you’re advised to bring your own just in case.  Most often, you’ll need to do what the locals do and use the tabo, a small dipper with a handle and a water pail to wash yourself.

Toilet paper was invented in China in the 6th century, and though its use is on the rise in China, it is still pretty rare throughout most of Asia. In most parts of India, for example, a person eats and touches food only with her right hand and she cleans herself with her left.  Don’t touch that bread with your left hand!

Ask a Filipino why they don’t use toilet paper, and you’ll probably hear a commonly repeated assumption:  the Philippines doesn’t have the tree or paper industry for it, which isn’t completely true. The Philippines has a significant forestry industry. Most of their tree harvest and wood production, however, goes into making furniture and other wood-based manufactured items, not into pulp for tissue paper. According to the Philippine Forest Management Bureau, in 2012, for example, the country exported products worth about $52 billion. But they also still imported paper tissue products, including toilet paper, worth $24 million. So both the scarcity of toilet paper manufacturing and the high price (for most Filipinos) of an imported good definitely explain part of the low TP use.

But the question itself is culturally biased toward toilet paper usage. Maybe the question to ask is: why use toilet paper when washing with soap and water has been the accepted practice for centuries? Is it any more sanitary than wiping? Here's where most locals will reveal that in fact, the tabo is perfectly sanitary.  In other words, why wipe when you can wash? 

Ultimately, using toilet paper is, pardon the pun, a bit wasteful. It’s no surprise that on average Americans have the highest tissue and toilet paper usage per capita in the world. 

Between our “irresponsible amount of napkins” used on the front end of the digestive process (thank you, Jon Stewart, I’m gonna miss you so much), the crazy amount of paper towels we use, and our wasteful waste practices, well, maybe the piped in soundtrack of many public restrooms and restaurants should be the sound of chainsaws cutting down trees.

Am I getting too pedantic? Don't get me wrong, I'm still using paper products, even in the land of the tabo, but I do pride myself on getting through a meal now by only using one measly thin napkin.

In a tropical place like the Philippines, except for printing books and important documents and doing homework, paper is pretty over-rated. With the high humidity and the likelihood of little insects crawling into paper products, at least with food packaging, one soon realizes the benefits of plastic.

Don’t think the low paper use here is some “save the planet” ecological instinct in the Filipino psyche. While Filipinos skimp on paper, they are absolutely bananas for plastic bags. Often to get one’s purchase out of a store in the Philippines, the stuff goes in a bag in a bag, and then inside another bag. Never mind paper saving, the plastic bag is ubiquitous. 

The one time I seriously felt I was breaking a cultural taboo was when I told the woman at the bakery register that I didn't need a plastic bag for the ube roll I was buying. I tried to explain that I was just going to sit at a table two two steps away and eat it. "No, thank you, I don't need a bag," I politely said. 

She already had the plastic bag open and read and it positively threw her. No, I insisted, just leave the roll on the tray, I'll be okay. She still looked confused, a little offended. "No bag?" she asked.

I tried to smile politely, but didn't know what to do. "Do you have a paper napkin?" I asked. 

One wonders what the Filipinos did to store their food before the plastic bag. Oh yeah, they had ceramic bowls and jars from China. The Chinese ceramics trade. Here we are, back at China.

The city market is not listed in my travel guide book as a place to visit and it's definitely not on TripAdvisor. If I were a tourist passing through Dumaguete, I probably would have missed it. But in three week's time, the public market has become one of my favorite places. It tells me so much about the unique people and their culture. And it's a place where, as a foreign visitor, I am able to interact with the people of Dumaguete. I observe. I ask questions. I listen and learn there.

When Joseph and I were in Manila in January, I managed to find a cookbook called 7000 Islands: A Food Portrait of the Philippines by Australian-Filipina author Yasmin Newman. Within days of setting up our home here, I was trying new dishes such as pancit Bihon (thin rice noodles with chicken and vegetables in fish sauce and vinegar), Bicol express (pork in coconut milk with ginger and lots of chili peppers--I've discovered the small but powerful bird's-eye chili!), escabeche (sweet and sour fish), chicken adobo (my recipe calls for coconut milk, vinegar, and soy and fish sauces--there are many versions of adobo in Filipino cooking), green mango salad, and pancit Canton (egg noodles with chicken and vegetables in soy sauce and sesame oil). Last week I finally bought a small charcoal grill for about 180 pesos ($4.50) and made inasal nga manok (grilled chicken marinaded in vinegar, calamansi juice--a small native citrus that tastes somewhere between a lime and an orange--soy sauce and sugar). This last recipe came from Country Cooking: Philippine Regional Cuisines, by Michaela Fenix.

What's easiest about cooking here, besides the fact that I have the time to shop and prep for all this food, is the easy availability of all the ingredients for authentic Filipino cooking. While Dumaguete has supermarkets that carry most things a modern cook would need, I discovered early on that the best place to buy fresh produce is the city market. And everything costs a lot less there too. The market is a place teeming with life. Every time I go, I discover something new.