My travels to places where there are no paths to follow.
For nearly a decade from the mid-1970s onwards, I turned Cavite province into a big backyard, having been able to visit all its municipalities and gradually familiarize myself with its main routes, poblacions, churches and convents, even a number of beach resorts. Don’t ask me the whys and wherefores, because that’s another story.
You know Polaris, of course. It’s also known as the North Star.
If you happen to find yourself in strange and trackless outdoors at night — like at sea, in the desert or on a mountaintop — and you don’t have any compass or GPS or radar beam or gas station from which to get directions, you can at least try to fix your position and best route on a mental or paper map.
To do that, you need to find at least one of the four compass points from where you stand. In the northern skies at night, the easiest to find is the north. That’s where Polaris is located. It floats there at one spot of the sky, almost motionless in a fixed position above the North Pole while the rest of stardom appear to rotate around it as the hours pass by. Continue reading “The night Polaris turned my world upside down”
Have you ever wondered about many Filipinos plan to spend their Holy Week, and how they actually spend it? This story is one I’ve been meaning to write in essay form, or maybe as a full-blown cartoon strip, for maybe a year now. But with the limited time I can spare today, and not wanting to let the week pass without saying something about the Lenten customs of most of Metro Manila’s middle class, I ended up with this. Part 1 today, Part 2 on Sunday. Enjoy. Continue reading “A Lenten tale of two cities”