How To Catch Crabs in the South

More river talk... here's my take on crabbing during a visit to Beaufort.



In the early morning darkness, we all file out the door to go crabbing. It's cold outside, and out beyond, dawn is slowly crawling out on the horizon. We walk on the wooden planks to get to the hut nearly floating on the side of the river.

We are in Beaufort, S.C. and we are about to haul out of the water the morning catch. I have never seen yet, nor cared to ask, how crabs are caught. I have always dismissed them as someone else' problem, hence, something that I don't have to think of. I have also noticed these little crab-like folks that run around on the sand when we go to the beach, but I look at them as cute little thingys that you chase around on the sand. So when everyone goes into an amazed state at the mention of catching crabs, I play along.

When we get to the hut, we look for the rope that connects to the basket trap. We haul it out of the water and find crabs... and chicken. It turns out that "in these parts", they attract the crabs with raw chicken quarters. Yes, as we say it in slang, sosyalin! You put the chicken inside the basket trap, put it in the water and leave it either for the day or overnight.

What we get are Blue Crabs, because parts of its claws are blue. Later, these will be cooked, the table will be covered with newspapers, where after an hour or two, a mountain of crab shells will show up.

I don't eat crab anymore due to dietary "rules" I have adopted, and don't ask me why. But it's great to see people eating from the bounties of the rivers and the seas, eating fresh and simple food. A big part of travel is also about tasting the local flavor, both the simple and the more complicated gastronomic delights.

Crabbing was a simple exercise of putting in a basket and hauling out the basket. Well, yes, there was the chicken too. But when done in the fresh morning air, in clean waters, with friends and family, it can be a pretty rewarding experience.

Pyrolympics Awarding Ceremonies Tomorrow (Saturday)

Last week, I turned my back on the World Pyro Olympics and instead went home to watch the Great King Sejong show on TV. Well, another relative is recently in town on vacation and I will actually suggest that they go to the Pyrolympics awarding ceremonies tomorrow. It's the last night and there will be a Fellowship of Fire exhibition display.

What makes it even bigger is that for the past few years, the competition has been held in the classical fireworks exhibition format, or Classical Pyrotechnics. Simply put, that is fireworks with no musical accompaniment. Next year, the organizers are said to be planning to introduce the pyro-musical format, where the fireworks are synchronized to music.

Read more on the Pyrolympics and the participating countries at the clickthecity[dot]com website.

Frank Gehry and MOCA Los Angeles

Earlier today, I discovered this video of Frank Gehry's talk (From 1990, defending a vision for architecture). I never realized that it's kind of long but it's a good introduction to him and his work. I loved his design of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California.


When I was in Los Angeles, I happened to wander into the Museum of Contemporary Arts (L.A.). It's also a great place to discover design. It's just in front of the Walt Disney Concert Hall and it has a great collection of Frank Gehry's designs, including the previous versions of the Concert Hall when it was still being designed. There are also a lot of interesting stuff there like, like a mechanical skirt that "blooms" or sort of moves. There are architectural models of the Bubble Building in Beijing, the Beijing Olympic Stadium, fabric designs by Issey Miyake and other great stuff on fashion. What's more, the entrance fee is only USD$8. That ticket also got me free entrance to their satellite museum at the Pacific Design Center. But I wasn't able to go there anymore as I ran out of time.

Grand Avenue is a good place to wander and explore. What are your favorite architectural highlights in your city?

Visiting Savannah

In my previous post (It Takes Clouds to Make a Glorious Beaufort Sunrise), I wrote about a trip to Beaufort, SC. After Beaufort, our party went on to explore Savannah, Georgia, which is only around 2 hours from there. Savannah is a beautiful city; I have been there twice and every time I always find something new or cool. It's a city rich with tradition and history. There are historic homes all over, historic cemeteries and historic forts. The downtown area is now one of the largest National Historic Landmark Districts in the United States.

I took the picture above at the Colonial Park Cemetery. With Spanish moss hanging from trees, silence, old tombstones for publishers, businessmen, leaders and patriots, the cemetery is calming yet eerie at the same time. That's why I found it interesting to find people reading or walking/exercising there. Usually, cemeteries are only visited on special occasions or on November 1st. But here, people treat the place as a park.

In Savannah, I love walking on River Street and Factors' Walk, visiting the "squares" that are all over the city, having lunch at Paula Deen's The Lady and Sons, walking around to look at the unique architecture and, generally, just soaking up on all that Southern charm. An author, Nick Cohn, talked to someone in Savannah once and that person told him that the secret to living there is to live slow, to learn to drip like honey.

Remember that movie called Forrest Gump? "Life is like a box of chocolates" and all that? The scenes where he was sitting on a bench waiting for the bus were shot at Chippewa Square. Unfortunately, the bench is not there anymore. There's a replica of the bench at the museum at the Savannah Visitors' Center.

I think I actually wrote something about Savannah before, which I will look for after writing this. Some of my suggested things to see and do when in the city are below. Savannah is a city great for walking, so I suggest you stroll around, take out the camera and explore.

Must see:

• Factors' Walk
• River Street
• City Market
• Colonial Park Cemetery
• Bonaventure Park (where the statue commonly associated with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil used to be; it's now in a museum)
• Cathedral of St. John the Baptist
• Telfair Museum of Art
• Chippewa Square
• Forsythe Park
• Historic Homes (great also if you can schedule during the Savannah Tour of Homes)
• Tybee Island (for the Tybee Island Light Station, the first lighthouse on the southern Atlantic coast)
• Mercer-Williams House

Must dos:

• Eat. There is Paula Deen's The Lady and Sons (the Sunday buffet has a good Southern spread) and other nice restaurants at the City Market.
• Visit the "squares".
• Join a ghost tour.
• Walk along River Street.
• Watch how a taffy is made. There are stores selling water taffy along River Street.
• Take pictures of the unique architectural highlights.
• Find unique water spouts. There are uniquely designed water spouts all over; I saw one shaped like a fish' head.
• See all the must-see's.

It Takes Clouds to Make a Glorious Beaufort Sunrise

Around two and a half years ago, I got invited by a friend to go to Beaufort, South Carolina. I have been looking for the pictures from that trip for years now. While poking through my email accounts (yes, I maintain several email accounts), I found pictures from that trip that I emailed to myself years ago. Past disaster recovery plan trainings are working, I guess.

We arrived in Beaufort at night, just long enough to meet our host, my friend's family friend who were gracious enough to let us stay at their lake cabin. The next day, we woke up very early in the morning to go crabbing. Going around in the dark, the morning light slowly crept on the horizon. Everything was still and quiet. The picture above is a testament to that beautiful moment when you get afraid to even whisper.

Then the clouds came. Big, glorious clouds that we all went scrambling to get our cameras to get pictures. It was still silent, the water was calm, but the clouds made our day. As they say, it takes clouds to make a glorious sunrise.

When I Got Lost in a Temple

Here is one of my posts in Friendster Blogs, where I write about a visit to a temple in Bangkok, Thailand:

It was nearly dusk and I thought our friends have left me in a corner of Bangkok. We were inside the complex of the 16th century old Wat Pho (sometimes also called Wat Po), Bangkok’s oldest and largest Buddhist temple complex. An oriental circus is practicing their routine in the middle of the complex and schoolchildren from the temple’s elementary school are playing ping-pong. Earlier, against all pre-departure advise, we took a ten-minute ride in a tuk-tuk to peek at the temple’s 151-foot-long, gold-plated Reclining Buddha. Well, with a temple name like that, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t about to leave the city without setting foot on the place.

The group I was looking for didn’t bring their cellphones, or one of them did, but I didn’t have the number. Fortunately, I saw one of them a few minutes later. It turns out she was also lost. We walked around to look for the others, and when we got tired, we walked some more, hoping that that extra few steps will mean finding our other friends.

After almost memorizing the layout of the temple complex, after minutes and minutes of looking for the other group, we found them sitting under a tree in the middle of the compound, relaxing and chatting the minutes away. Chura neto! It turns out that while we were frantically looking for them, they were up there in one of the stupas, or whatever you call that, and someone suggested that they all go inside one of the chambers. They all felt adventurous and explored the chamber.

I’m torn on how to conclude this. Sometimes, we need to walk a little bit farther, look a little bit harder. There are also times when we need to just sit down, relax and not worry so much. You never know, they may be just up there in one of the stupas feeling like a modern-day Indiana Jones.

Pasadena Museums

Around five hours ago, the Mars Phoenix Lander landed on Mars. In mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California everyone was celebrating in the middle of the chaos. This reminded me of my little adventure about a year ago, when I went to the Huntington, maybe took a wrong turn and got lost along the way, then ended up at the gate of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That was exciting... but it also scared me in a way, so I quickly made a U-turn and looked for the highway.

Why was I in the area again? I was looking the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens, which is only one of the most beautiful gardens in the East coast and has one of the most extensive and impressive art collections. The Huntington is free every first Thursday of the month. When I was there, I didn't have to get a ticket, but it seems they now require everyone to get advanced tickets on Free Day.

Another great museum to visit is the Norton Simon Museum, also in Pasadena. It's free every first Friday of the month, from 6pm to 9pm.

More great links and info to free museum days in Los Angeles here: Free Museum Days.

Turning My Back on Pyrolympics 2008

Early yesterday, things were calm, peaceful and great. But when my sister wanted me to go the Mall of Asia to meet with them, that was when the pandemonium started. It seemed like all of Manila was there. It turns out, it was the fourth night of the 2008 World Pyro Olympics, or Pyrolympics for short. It's a fireworks competition that goes from supposedly 6pm to 8pm but an insider told me when I was there that it's from 7pm to 9pm. Probably because summer is already here and we have longer days.

The best ways to watch it is by either watching from a skyscraper in Makati or Manila, a hotel near Manila Bay, or going to the SM Mall of Asia. When at the mall, you can pay PHP150 to watch from the ground floor, but there are no seats and there can be quite a throng there. Another way is to "reserve" tables at the veranda restaurants that face the bay; but the restaurants mostly offer "set menus" that can from PHP700-1,000. It's a good deal in a way, but a little expensive for me. Kind of. You can reserve by going to the tables near the areas marked "Reservation Desks" near the seaside area at the Entertainment Center.

I didn't watch it last night. It was too chaotic for me, a little too disorganized and expensive. Besides, I had to rush home to catch the Great King Sejong on KBS World. But if you're into this, do plan for it and go. The fireworks can be quite nice, I saw it once while traveling to the airport.

The last night of the Pyrolympics will be on May 31, 2008 (Saturday) and I believe it will be France vs. Philippines. Happy gazing.

Sunday Mass at the Mariner's Club Hong Kong

We've been walking for several blocks and my uncle just kept on walking without saying a word on where we were headed. It was a Sunday, and I knew that we were going somewhere to attend mass. But I couldn't see a church anywhere! In the busiest commercial section of Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong, church steeples are rare.

When we arrived at a building somewhere, I thought we were stopping for an errand first. Imagine my surprise when I saw that inside, there were smaller rooms, including a small chapel filled with Filipinos, and a few Chinese and British nationals, preparing for Sunday mass. I was totally blown away to find these devout and prayerful lot in the middle of Hong Kong. It was also weird in a way because the mass was so like the way mass is done in the Philippines.

After the mass, I went outside to peek at the other rooms. There was a British family outside, in a circle, talking. The men were wearing Sunday suits, the women in dresses and the little baby dressed in white with frills and ruffles. It looked like the baby was about to be baptized.

Later, I found out that this was the Mariner's Club, a hub for devout Filipino Roman Catholics on Sunday mornings, and a hub for seafarers at other times. When you're in the area when you travel to Hong Kong, be sure to drop by and observe the mass on Sunday morning. It's just different.

The Mariner's Club is located at 11 Middle Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, HK.

Dreamy Morning Drives

There's a road in the Druid Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, GA that winds through dreamy homes, where people regularly do their morning jogs and a canopy of trees shade you from the hot Southern sun. For several weeks, I had to pass by this neighborhood where some of Atlanta's wealthiest citizens live. My morning drive consisted of going through Peachtree Street, then Ponce de Leon Avenue, a left on Clifton Road at the corner of the Druid Hills Golf and Country Club, and winding my way up to North Decatur Road. At first, I dreaded the drive, where the roads are crooked and the maximum speed is only 25 mph. But after a while, I began to enjoy it, I began to appreciate the landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the place and "ambience" of the neighborhood.

Coming from the Philippines, where the drivers are kind of suicidal, I found it funny to have to stop everywhere there's a stop sign printed on the road and on intersections, when I was running at a top speed of 23 mph. I noticed too, that everyone was very courteous, so when at an intersection, I stop, and when there's another car coming from the other side, I wave and yield to the other driver. It wasn't a place run by stoplights, it was the South after all, where grace and good manners were de rigeur.

Sometimes we face uncertainty, find ourselves at a new place or are forced to be where we don't want to be. But sometimes, with a little bit of luck and effort, we can find ourself enjoying the place and the whole experience.

Taal Blessings

The Volcano This Time
Blessed by a clear day, our aimless joyride to Tagaytay went quite well. The picture of Taal Volcano above was taken around three weeks ago. My cousin and a family friend wanted to go around, so off we went to Tagaytay with no particular destination in mind. We stopped at the Taal Vista Lodge to take pictures of the lake, but everyone just wanted to take pictures of themselves. They wanted to take their picture with the volcano behind them, with the hotel behind them, them on the garden chairs, them on the lawn... I kept telling them to take a picture of the volcano, because at any other time, the whole area could have been covered by fog. We finally took the picture above.

I Like Mine Just Slightly Sweet

When on a trip to Tagaytay, I like buying the buko pies from Collette's. They're a classic Tagaytay/Laguna experience. They are creamy, filled with coconut and just slightly sweet. Also try going to Palace in the Sky, which was built for the official state visit of former US President Ronald Reagan, although their trip was eventually cancelled. Go there not so much for the "palace" but for the view, the scenery and the cool, fresh air.

I don't really like paying for so much at the chi-chi places, though there are a lot of country clubs, golf courses, a yacht club and gourmet restaurants in Tagaytay if you're into that. Instead, go to the City Market, where you'll find loads and loads of fruits and other local produce. You will find watermelons, sweet pineapples, coconuts, avocadoes, sweet potatoes, and other local goodies.

The city is also a foodie's haven, where beef bulalo, a local specialty, is found everywhere. Bulalo is boiled bone-in beef shank in beef stock with varous vegetables. It's really yummy and great in the cool mountain climate. Another must-try is Breakfast at Antonio's, which has come to be quite popular that you must be prepared to wait a little (or try calling for reservation) to be seated.

Links:

Tagaytay City

Breakfast at Antonio's