#31 Don't Throw Your Garbage Here

Which is what this sign says. Makes you wonder why people would need signs like that.. very common in this city.

#30 Green Mangoes

One of the streetfoods of Tacloban, plain green mangoes eaten raw with salt, hipon (fermented microscopic shrimps) or bagoong (fermented anchovies). You will see stalls like this as you walk downtown.

#29 Another old house

Another 'old' house belonging to the old families in Tacloban. This one is where my favorite secondhand bookshop /coffeeshop (Libro) is located. You can read a good book AND drink coffee at the same time. Old Filipino-Spanish homes in the Philippines used the first floor as the 'grannary' where they stock-piled rice grains. I remember such homes and the smell of mustiness and earth, the coolness and the feeling of being home. Kind of like being in a cellar with windows. There's a trend now, of repainting these old houses with vivid colors. Remember the Pepsi ad?
Hehe

#28 Road Rules

In any city in the Philippines (except Makati), it's not surprising to see someone breaking the law, vendors selling pirated cds or smuggled goods openly on the sidewalk while policemen watch indifferently, or motorists not following simple road rules. Here you'll see cars parked on a no parking busy crossing.

#27 Singing Numbers (Numbers Theme Day)

What can I say, Asians love dried fish. We have all kinds, sorted by sizes, way of drying, way of cutting and slicing, type of fish, etc.. When you're visiting Asia and staying near residential houses and smell something awful, chances are someone in the neighborhood is frying dried fish.

When you go to a market and buy one of these, it's now sold by kilos. Before, they were sold by hundreds or by piles. How do you count small fishes by hundreds?? In the town of Palo (12 km from Tacloban) where there's a tabo (big market day every Saturday), dried fishes are sometimes sold by kilos (as shown in the photo above), or sometimes still by hundreds. There's a tradition here where counting is sung. Yes, old women count by singing the numbers. Their chantings syncrhonize and it is very fascinating to listen. The practice is slowly disappearing though. I had to ask a teenager to give me a sample because it's hard to find these old women now. The video is below if you're interested to see. This is my theme day photo (old stock photo), the one above and the video below. Enjoy!



(A short documentary film of this tradition won the Best Foreign Short Documentary Film at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in 2004. The film is called Singing Songs of Leyte by Eli Africa. Also, I wrote an expanded version of this post about Singing Numbers in my travel blog last year, if you're interested to read about it, here's the link.)

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