My Published Articles for ViewsHound: Life in the United States versus Life in the Philippines

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Life in the United States versus Life in the Philippines

The Beautiful and Scenic Island of Marinduque( This article was originally published in my Hubpages account on 8/30/14)

After my retirement from the Food and Drug Administration in 2002, my wife and I decided that we should divide our year between the US and in the Philippines. Our goal was to stay in the Philippines in the island of Marinduque ( my wife's ancestral province) when it starts to get chilly and cold here in Northern California. When the hot and humid summer starts in the Philippines we will fly back to US. We have achieved this goal since 2002 and to the present. Our friends and relatives call us snowbirds because of this lifestyle.( photos)and link http://livinginmarinduquephilippines.blogspot.com/

We have planned this lifestyle 4 years before my retirement. We started construction of our main house in 1998. It was a 3-bedroom French Style Ranch house in a 5-acre lot formerly a coconut plantation. The lot was inherited by my wife and about 7 miles from the downtown Boac. It has a beach at the back and the national road in the front.
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Two years later at the urging of our kids, we build a two story beach house. We named it Chateau Du Mer. ( link)and Photos. The next year we built a conference hall big enough to accommodate 300 attendees. In 2005, we decided to open the Beach House and Hall for rent to the public. With this development, I decided to advertise the Beach house and Conference Hall via the Internet.

As of today, we have hosted more than 25 clients for the beach house from US, Australia and Europe. The hall have hosted more than a dozen wedding receptions, birthday parties, meetings, seminars and family reunions. We have hosted three garden weddings and one seaside weddings as of today.

Marinduque, A Gardener's Paradise

The tropical climate of Marinduque is ideal for growing not only orchids, hibiscus and bougainvillas but also euphorbias, cacti, succulents, plumerias and Ylang Ylang trees. Since I am an avid gardener this place is paradise for me.

The above plants are easy to grow and almost pest- free except for the two varieties of hibiscus ( white and yellow). My favorite orchid, a blue orchid is called "The Princess Mikasa".The Ylang Ylang flowers is the most fragrant flower in the garden. It reminds me of the perfume Channel #5. I have several varieties of hibiscus. My favorite is the canary-yellow(light orange) variety.

Marinduque is a photographer's dream. The province is endowed with unspoiled white sand beaches, pristine blue waters, fringing reefs, virgin coral reefs, isolated coves, limestone caves, meandering and underground rivers, mountain peaks, cascading waterfalls and streams, fabled sulfur and hot mineral springs, old churches, antique homes and of course beautiful sunsets and sunrises.

The Internet is filled with photographs of the scenic beauty of this island not only from the local amateur and professional photographers but also from photographers all over the world. The province has more than six islands popular to beach lovers, scuba divers and snorkeling enthusiasts. Among the popular islands are Tres Reyes Islands and Maniwaya Island.

It has also Mt Malindig known to mountain climbers and hikers. It has Bathala* and Tarug Caves popular to spelunkers and just curious seekers. In one of the eight caves of Bathala, there is a resident python, believed to be enchanted. If he shows himself when you visit the caves, it is suppose to bring you good luck.

One of the tourist attractions in the Island is the Bellarocca Resort and Spa-a five star resort popular to rich Filipinos, Koreans and Japanese tourist. However, just recently I heard that the resort is not doing well financially for lack of foreign clients because of the absence of air transportation from Manila and back. The good news is that by next month the newly improved airport will be certified for air services from two national airlines. If this happens, this will be a boost to tourism business in the Island.

The Moriones Festival

This hub about Marinduque-our second home is not complete if I do not add or write a paragraph about the Moriones Festival.

The island of Marinduque celebrates every year one of the most colorful Festival in the Philippines. Morion means "mask" or "visor," a part of the medieval Roman armor which covers the face. Moriones, on the other hand, refers to the masked and costumed penitents who march around the town for seven days searching for Longinus.

This week-long celebration starts on Holy Monday and culminates on Easter Sunday when the story of Longinus is reenacted in pantomime. Longinus, is a Roman centurion who was blind in one eye but was cured when the blood of Jesus spurted on his eye during the Crucifixion.

Home is not a Place but in Your Heart

Our friends often asked us which abode do we prefer. Our answer is always the same, both places. Marinduque is an excellent place during winter time and Northern California is an excellent abode during Spring, Summer and Fall. We love both places and hopefully we can continue our snowbird lifestyle in the future years to come. To continue this lifestyle requires good health and finances. I am hoping for the best and thanking the Lord for all the blessings He has given us all the previous years and the years to come.

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Life in the United States versus Life in the Philippines

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