Easter Sunday

Holy Week is right up there with Christmas as THE holiday time here in the Philippines. Hotel and resort prices all shoot up for the week and Filipino's tend to come home for the holiday. Easter is a big deal here with the parade floats carrying Jesus and all the different Catholic Saints and huge Mary's. People will walk amongst the floats carrying candles and looking a little zombie like following the mobs to the big old Catholic church in the middle of town. There outside the church people are selling candles, leaves, flowers, snacks and balloons (?) to all the bystanders.
The Sunday before Easter (Palm Sunday) people are lined outside the old Catholic church selling palm leaves in remembrance of when "Jesus walked from Bethany to Jerusalem. He rode into the city on a donkey, as a verse in the Old Testament said He would. People recognized Him as their King, shouting, "Hosanna," and laying down palm leaves in front of the donkey to keep dust from getting on the Savior. Jesus visited the temple and then returned to Bethany. See Zechariah 9:9; Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11."*

Then starting Thursday everything is shut down for Holy Thursday, Black Friday and Easter Sunday (or as Elder Holland refers to it in An Apostle's Easter Thoughts on Christ: Passover Thursday, Atoning Friday and Resurrection Sunday). By shut down I mean nothing is open but the hotel restaurants and a few side stores independently owned. The roads are dead and people use the weekend to go to midnight mass, go to the beach or pool and spend time with their families.
We spent Sunday together as our little family unit. We went to church and spent those three hours with our ward family before coming home and reading about the week leading up to Jesus Christ's resurrection and sharing President Monson's testimony of the Savior. We read a couple of articles for kids about what that means for us and why it's so important and then we sat down and watched the movie 'Rio.'
After Ryan had to run out quickly for a meeting and the kids went and played outside in the rain while I got dinner ready. They ran splashing in all the puddles getting soaked and laughing like crazy.

It was such a nice Easter to spend together as a family and the kids got the message that Easter Sunday was important because Jesus lives. Actually they got really animated and excited because He lives, "see it's ok mom."
I know this is a little late but I hope you can enjoy this Easter message from our church:

*The Friend (Volume 41 Number 4 April 2011). Easter Week. The Friend: A Children's Magazine Published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, pg. 24-25.

Easter Saturday

This year we broke Easter up into a two day affair. I really wanted my kids to understand the role that Jesus plays in Easter but not take away the fun that most people do to celebrate the weekend. I thought about it and decided to separate the two. SO, on Saturday we celebrated Easter in the sense of spring. We decorated eggs, went for a nice walk outside as a family, shrunk our chip bags and had a dance party. Before lunch I sat my kids down and taught them about Spring. They haven't really experienced season's before, all they know is snow and sweat so to talk to them about rain and why it's important, and baby animals was interesting. I pretty much got a lot of blank stares and loud animal noises from an excited Madison but that's about it. I also told them that tomorrow the Easter Bunny would not be visiting our house. Wow, this did cause a reaction... big sad shocked eyes. I explained that Sunday wasn't about a rabbit but about the importance of Jesus' resurrection and that because of this event we can all live together as an eternal family. I said tomorrow we were reserving for Jesus. Still big shocked eyes so I just said "look, tomorrow is about Jesus, not the Easter Bunny. You'll just have to wait until we get to Canada and Nana and Papa are going to hide your Easter candy then." Well, off they ran happy as could be and the crisis was adverted. I hope Nana is taking notes and I'm really happy she showed them some Easter candy the day before so I had something back up my story.

So as I mentioned we decorated our eggs Saturday. It was fun. Brayden and Sydney knew exactly what to do and Brayden brought up the really pretty eggs that Auntie Kait made that one year. Seriously, this kid and him memory! That was 3 years ago! Maddy just was obsessed with making her egg yellow screaming at us "lellow, lellow" not wanting to share the colour with anyone else until finally we just grabbed her yellow egg and dumped it into blue and watched it turn green.
So what do you do after you make your eggs?? Well if you're my kids you eat your eggs.

Recycling Beattie Style

For those of you who didn't know me when I was younger I used to be a Brownie and my mom was one of the leaders right through all those years of brown dresses, orange scarfs and yes, even brown underwear for both my sister and I. We did lots of fun crafts, camps and stuff like that but one of the crafts I remember the most is shrinking chip bags. I had attempted this once before with my kids but it didn't turn out. Something about fire blazing in the oven ... not too sure :S
Anyway, I decided to save chip bags to try again. The problem was that our chip intake has severely decreased and so it's taken quite a long time for me to find the perfect specimen. Finally ... we have it. What we did was wash out the chip bag so all the chip crumbs and oils are out of the bag and then we gently dried it with a paper towel. We then carefully placed the bag on a greased piece of tin foil covering the baking sheet and put it into an oven set around 350*F and sat there, watching and waiting:

Within a minute our chip bag started to shrink up. I think we kept it in the oven for 5 minutes before pulling it out to find this:

This works WAY better with those small bag of chips! You can make them into earrings, I know, I know! TOO COOL. So next grocery shopping trip I'm going to buy a couple of the small bags for the kids and we're going to have an oven party! I'll let you know how they turn out, the kids have already polished off some chips and we've safely put them into storage waiting.

Healthier Thirties?

Food. Food = my weakness. I have had to work so hard to work on portion sizes and actually staying within those portion sizes because let's be honest ... portion sizes are SO small! Willpower is not something I'm good with but whatever. I guess I've come to some sort of realization that I eat what I eat and I run enough to keep me from getting huge. I do however have this account with myfitnesspal.com which is pretty cool. It keeps track of everything for you, you can write down all the ingredients in a recipe and it will calculate the nutrition and caloric values for you! It's a great way to keep track of what you are putting into your body. Now that i'm getting OLDer I feel like living a healthier lifestyle (one not filled with chocolate and salt & vinegar chips) is important. Of course I still eat half the bowl of cookie dough when I'm baking cookies or hide my chocolate bars so I don't have to share, I just don't do it as much!
SO, with that being said Ryan and I went to a new restaurant on last weeks date night. A Korean restaurant. There are quite a few Korean's here in Bacolod, especially throughout the Philippines. Strangely they come here to learn English, English with a Filipino accent and grammer? But English is English I suppose. This restaurant had been recommended to us on more then one occasion so we decided to just do it and try it. I was happy about it because it's not sweet fried foods and would go along with my healthier eating lifestyle goals. We had our waitress go through the menu with us telling us what the more popular items were and what she liked best. We settled on a few different things and crossed our fingers for the best. It turned out pretty good. Free appetizers which was some sort of pickled cabbage roll in spicy sauce, potato's in teriyaki sauce, bean sprouts and spinach type something in peanut oil (?). We ordered a pork bbq which was so yummy and we wrapped in lettuce along with a beef stirfry with all these great veg in it. They cooked them on our table and explained what it was and how to eat it, what sauces to dip it into. I'm not too sure if Ryan was sold on the whole meal but I liked it and my body was so happy to have all those nice fresh vegetables in it!

Never Thought I'd Say That ...

Four and a half years ago Ryan and I were trying to settle into our new life here in the Philippines with our 25 month old boy and a 7 month old girl. Now here we are with a 6 year old, 5 year old, and 2 year old. I have 2 girls who favorite food is rice and a boy who loves red filipino hotdogs (which I refuse to touch) more then the normal brown (?) hotdogs I know and love. I'm positive that their time here will have a major impact on their lives and who they will become, how they view minorities in the future and hopefully give them a love to explore different cultures. When I hear my kids say things that sound Filipino or love to walk by the fish section in the grocery store to see the big fish eyes staring back at them, I expect it, this is the only life they know. When I hear myself say some things out loud ... I know it's been too long:

We are driving down the street past a little meat market and I casually mention to Ryan "You were lucky there were pig heads hanging here when you took your mom because there aren't any left today."

All In A Days Work

Around here it seems that the roads are always under repair. The long narrow road that leads to our house is slowly eroding away including the bridge. There is only one route home and the road is crap. Along with navigating like a race care driver around these huge potholes (which have just recently caused us a flat tire) you also have to fight with all the jeepneys parked on one side of the road while the drivers have their nap. This makes for a long, annoying one way road. I don't know too much about road construction but the guys that occasionally fill these massive potholes with dirt and stand there with their tin cup looking for a gratuity all day long aren't fixing anything. Another thing I don't understand ... cement? Why use cement? It's obviously not working here people so why not try pavement? There is one section of our Island that has used pavement for all it's roads and highways and it's a dream to drive on, so quiet and smooth and the road damage is so minimal. Maybe it's lack of equipment? Because they seem to do it all by hand including chipping away the old chunk of cement road so they can lay the new pad.
While we were driving home from Siquijor there was a section of the road that they were putting wire meshing along the aligning cliff to help keep the falling rocks off the road. Great idea. Lets use our wood scaffolding to get up high enough to lay the cement frame for the wire mesh. Looks extra safe to me!

Picture Definition of Resourcefulness

Sugar is Sweet. The Work Is Not

I think that the crummiest job I have seen other then a Filipino garbage collector is a sugarcane harvester. These guys go out into the hot fields with their big machete's and long clothes and bend over all day long whacking at the thick hard sugarcane stalks to cut them down. There has got to be a zillion mosquito's in these fields and it would be impossible to wipe the sweat dripping from your brow with your hands dirty from work. So they work all day in the blistering sun in the humidity making roughly $2/day. The majority of sugar cane plantation owners pay less then the $4/day minimum wage for agricultural workers and they hire children which is illegal. Nothing screams to me the importance of education like driving by these guys working in the fields trying to feed their families. So they work chopping down the sugar cane and then load bundles of it up onto the truck that will then take the sugar cane to the sugar mill. This is by far the biggest export on our island, it's filled with the sugar cane fields which once made Bacolod one of the wealthiest cities in the Philippines! It's so sad that these harvesters are taken so much for granted while the owners gain so much. How is a country ever going to change when it's so corrupt?

An Alluring Beauty

Siquijor is a smaller island with a coastline of 102km so as we toured the island looking at all the different sites we drove that entire coastline and then some. It was such an amazing drive. We were in a jeepney so the breeze kept us cool and without windows we got this spectacular view. The water was this vibrant colour around the entire island laced with little white sand beaches, mangrove tree's and little towns with houses right off the ocean. I wondered for a moment if these people even realized how beautiful the view was right outside their door but I guess if it's something you've seen every day of your life you might not 'see' it. That's how a lot of things were for me in Canada. It wasn't until the last time we came home when I really saw that true beauty of the mountains, Waterton and the canola fields. One of the best parts was to watch these people in their every day lives, just enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon. Some were driving, caring for their livestock, and some were sitting on their porch with their families. One site we see on every island here in the Philippines are 1L glass Coke bottles with either a red or green liquid in it. It took Ryan to explain to me that they were filled with either gasoline or diesel fuel. Genius. So even if there is only 1 gas station on the island there is never fuel too far off ... and sold by the litre! Siquijor was no different. Every once in a while on the side of the road there would be a little stall set up selling fues for those that needed a quick fill.

As we drove around getting a glimpse of the beauty of Siquijor and seeing the people going about their lives I was humbled. No big malls, no grocery store, no real restaurants except for a person cooking on the side of the road and selling that food in their shack and here I am complaining because I have no Walmart. Also something we noticed was that no matter what they were doing they seemed to love to stop and give us a big smile and wave as we passed by.

Siquijor was so clean, the waters looked inviting and the different colours of greens were breathtaking. I loved it, one of the prettiest places I've seen without a doubt.

Lola (Grandma) Conching

Just a short drive off the coastal road at the top of a mountain is a traditional Filipino style house with videoke blaring and hens being followed by their chicks. The house stands alone off a dirt road and as we pulled up everyone seated in the videoke room took a nice good look at us. Our driver lead us to the side of the house where we got to meet Lola Consolacion Achay the bolo-bolo healer.
Bolo-Bolo healing is a natural healing using clear water, a bambo style straw, a smooth black stone and cup. Lola Conching rinsed out her cup and filled it with clean water then dropped a shiny smooth black stone to the bottom. She then took the glass cup to the part of the body that was in need of healing. In our case we used Cheryl's twisted ankle and Lori's sore back. Lola would then start blowing bubbles through the straw into the cup and slowly the water started to become murky with these nasty floaties in it.

After a minute Lola Conching would examine the murky water. Apparently if the area is really effected the water will become dirty, then the blowing process is repeated until the water remains clear and the problem is cleansed. So she examines the water and dumps it out, rinses her glass and then refills it with clean water and repeats the blowing process. The second time, still dirty water forms but with less floaties so again she dumps the dirty out and starts again with clear water until the water remained clean while she blew her bubbles.
After the water remains clear she then takes some oils she keeps in a flask with special ingredients and rubs it on the affected area muttering something I couldn't hear with all the kareoke singing going on and blows onto the oil completing the ritual.

SO ... does it work? I'm not too sure. Cheryl seemed to find her sprained toes and ankles were better. Not completely healed but she regained mobility! And Lori? I guess her back felt better and she wasn't being sarcastic. How are they feeling now? I have no idea but I'm sure that flight back to Canada took it's toll. Maybe I could take up Bolo-Bolo healing and have a side line for when we move back home!? What do you think?

Paliton Beach

I had asked our driver to take us to Paliton Beach because I had read that it was one of the most beautiful beaches on the island. I had just assumed we would take a dirt road to a beach, get out and take a quick swim and walk around and get back into the jeepney and continue on our journey. What I didn't know was that this dirt road was the worst, bumpiest road with huge lava rocks scraping the bottom of this guys poor jeepney. I felt so bad having asked him to take us but he didn't say anything other then the guy who owned this section of land also owned the section of land Coco Grove Resort was located on. So we drive to a dead end where there is a nice strip of white sand beach lined with fisherman's boats and get out and walk past that beach through a field. After a short walk we arrive on this other strip of white sand where this big boat is being finished and the water is smooth and this amazing colour. The water was like warm bath water and the sand was seriously like powered sugar, so soft on the feet. There were a couple of small schools of black fish skimming the surface just where the water meets the sand and this amazing piece of rock jetting out of the water at the one end of the beach bringing the rich greens out over the blue of the water. So picture perfect, other then the boat about to launch for the first time completely private and worth the bumpy ride to get there.

Cambugahay Waterfalls

By far my favorite stop of the day was Cambugahay Falls. You walk down just 135 stairs until you reach the bottom tier of the falls. It's this amazingly clear water set in this rich green jungle that after the walk down seems so inviting and the perfect way to cool down. We walked up the path to the third tier before jumping and splashing around.

I was able to ride the kids on my back to go under the falls to the back part where we hung out looking out from behind the water while peeking out from the cascading water. We even took our turns jumping off the top of the falls into the deep pools below.

It was so pretty and peaceful. At around lunch time it seemed that everyone disappeared and we had the falls to ourselves so our driver brought down our packed lunch and we had a picnic at the base of the falls. It was such a good meal, grilled chicken with lemon, some oriental noodles along with rice or potato salad. It was the perfect picnic scenery and a great way to fuel us up for the short 135 step climb back up to the road.

Coral Killing Church

So I'm pretty sure that you couldn't get away with this now a days but check out this church built in 1887! Walls and bell tower made out of corals. Yup! Coral. Someone killed a lot of coral, plants and fish to make this church

So they have this convent across the street that is claimed to be the biggest convent in all of Asia. I was seriously impressed by this until I was reminded that the Philippines is the only Christian majority country in Asia, now ... not as impressed. Also these fancy bell towers were used also as watch towers to warn the people if pirates were coming! COOL!
Inside the church is stank. It stank like it was built in 1887 and started rotting away shortly after completion. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration but it definitely smelled old and unused. The roof was rotting away with these big holes in it and the wood frames holding up the massive roof looked like they were eroding away. It was cool and big but that's about it. No offense to the building or anything and I'm sure it was just magnificent in it's glory it's just really sad that no one seems to be caring for it anymore so we went and took some shots and went on our way.

Siquijor's Banyan Tree

Siquijor is famously known around the Philippines as the Island of witch craft and black magic. Apparently the island used to come alive at night with fire flies glowing and flying around. The rumour is that the Spanish first spotted Siquijor off the shore at night because the island lit up in the evening! Now I guess they still live in the trees but you have to go up into the mountains to find them. While we were out one evening at Coco Grove there were a few spotted in the trees flickering on and off but nothing like the stories I've read about. Along with these mystical legends of fire flies lighting up childrens cheeks and black magic healers there is the Banyan or “Balete” tree which holds the title as the oldest tree on Siquijor Island.
A Banyan tree starts off as a seed that finds it's way into a small snug spot like a crevice of another tree trunk and as it grows it's roots shoot out in every direction with a small trunk also starting to grow. Soon the roots take over and outgrow the trunk and continue taking over trees in the near area and also having it's own roots start forming it's own new Banyan trees. They can grow around in a circle leaving a small hollow center with these tree roots as it's walls where these natural healers will go and set up a special place to work their potions and rituals, oooOOooo.
Anyway this tree is apparently over 800 years old according to our guide!? I believe him, it was pretty huge and he referred to it as being just like the tree from Avatar. Looks about right to me, now we just need to find a bunch of wierd looking blue people and we got ourselves Pandora.

A Day of Rest and Relaxation

Saturday morning we woke up to amazing sunshine! It was so hot and the water was so clear, really the perfect day for laying around the beach. The kids made a sand castle with grandma, went snorkeling and we swam in the pretty sea. The colours were so vibrant with the white sand and corals underneath and the warm sun intensifying the greens and blues. It didn't take long to warm up and dry off in the sun after a swim! That's how we spent the first part of morning, playing in the sand and suntanning on the beach. Ryan and I went out for a snorkel and found some really nice coral and big rainbow fish. We saw long sword looking fish and a pufferfish swimming through these little ravines made in the corals. It was so pretty, I loved it.

After some time on the beach we were well roasted and so we made our way to the swimming pool which offered both sunshine and shade. The kids swam some more while I was able to relax a bit and enjoy the beautiful view everywhere I looked.

After our lunch we decided to go for a walk to the end of the beach where Grandma had found some cool lava type rock formations and caves! We walked along the beach passing the marine sanctuary, the diving school and the main restaurant which are all apart of the resort. We made it to the rocks and walked through the water to explore them and climbed up a few to see what was on the other side. Ryan thought about jumping but decided the water wasn't deep enough for a safe landing so instead we just had this amazing view!

It was such a great day. We fed the kids first and put them to bed and then us adults went out for a really yummy dinner later while we again watched the sunset from our dinner table outside on the beach. The breeze kept us cool enough to enjoy our meal and the sound of the waves was so peaceful. The only downer was the Tom Jones wanna be that started singing not so great and drowned out the sound of the waves. But whatever, not even he could ruin our perfect day! Especially with adventure and exploration on our horizons for the next day!