December 15, 2007. After visiting Bacolor Church, we proceeded to Guagua, Pampanga to visit Betis Church. It’s apparently one of the oldest churches in Pampanga, and it’s also certainly one of the most ornate. The church’s ceiling is painted with tableauxs of biblical scenes. Fortunately for everyone on the tour, we also witnessed the processional of some couple’s wedding. It must’ve been amusing for the foreigners with us.

On the way to our next destination, we were treated to one of Pampanga’s best-kept secrets–buko sherbet from San Jose in San Fernando City. The stuff is only sold in gallons, so we had an entire barrel of shaved ice and salt, buried in which is a tin can with five gallons of cold buko sherbet. I must have had five servings of the stuff the entire day.

Our next destination was an ancestral house in San Fernando City’s ‘heritage district‘ owned by the heirs of one of Pampanga’s old-rich families. It was a very pleasant visit. The Hizon family gladly welcomed us inside and toured us around their well-preserved and fully-functional home. I wish more heritage structures, particularly centuries-old houses, were like theirs–fully functional homes and not some museum filled with displays of antique items. I don’t think one could normally go inside the ancestral houses in the heritage district for visits. We were gladly welcomed in the Hizon home because one of our tour masters, Spanky, was a Hizon. Hehe.

Click here for more pictures!

Last December 29, my website just suddenly became inaccessible, and for the past two days, anybody who tried to access it, ended up in an error page. At first I was dumbfounded. True, my web host sent an advisory about a scheduled downtime due to some server migration, but that was supposed to be today, December 30. Perhaps it was one day early, I thought. However, their advisory said it would take at most 24 hours. By tonight, it had been almost two days. I was honestly getting really impatient and pissed. Not that it should really matter, it’s not as if there’s much to lose financially for me. This blog doesn’t even generate a dollar a day from paid advertising.

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Last December 15, Saturday, I joined the Ultimate Kapampangan Show-off tour of Anton Diaz, Ivan Henares, Ivan Mandy, and Spanky Enriquez.

I only got home earlier (or morning) at almost three in the morning from another all-nighter frat party and my brod Ivan H., asked me to be at 6750 in Makati by seven in the morning a few hours after to meet with everyone else with the tour. With an hour of sleep, I was able to make it on time from QC. Anyway, we left Makati shortly after half past seven and arrived in Pampanga just before nine in the morning.

Our first stop was the town of Bacolor, Pampanga. The town, over much of the 90’s, was almost completely buried under more than a dozen meters of lahar from the Mount Pinatubo eruption of 1991. After having deserted the town for years, people have been coming back to rebuild their communities. The town church, or the upper half of what’s left, is now being restored and renovated. Inside the church, there is a small section that serves as a museum, with photographs of the parish and the town during its better days. In fact, things were so much better before, Bacolor served as the temporary capital of the Spanish colonial government during the short British occupation of the archipelago.

I miss being a kid during Christmas. Sure, it still brings that warm snug feeling whenever you’re with your extended family. Perhaps its our consciousness that has been contaminated with the ugly realities of this world, that makes it feel less, um, exciting or magical.

We went to Amadeo and Indang in Cavite today and spent Christmas with the paternal relatives.

To culminate our weeks-long 89th anniversary celebration, the resident and the alumni brods staged a free concert at the University of the Philippines Theater last December 11, 2007. Featured performers were the UP Jazz Ensemble, Eileen Sison & Guarana, the Family Cruz Band, Up Dharma Down, Peacepipe and Pinikpikan.

The concert, through the various performers and bands, traced popular music from the 1920’s till today. This also served as a kick-off concert for next year’s centennial celebration of the university.

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If you pass by the walk in between AS (Palma Hall) and the Faculty Center (Rizal Hall), you might have noticed the STAND-UP (Student Alliance for the Advancement of Democratic Rights - UP) painting the past month. Yep, we painted the road last December 9 in celebration of our eleventh anniversary this year.

STAND-UP is the broadest student alliance in UP Diliman made up of more than thirty student organizations, fraternities and sororities. Founded in 1996, it is the leading militant student political party in the university (for more of its pre-1996 history, click here). Often branded by its rivals as the party of traditional and dogmatic activists, STAND-UP distinguishes itself from other student political parties in UP by linking the struggles of the students with the issues of the different sectors of the community, not only in the local but also national level.

Continued from here.

On December 4, we held our ‘infamous’ Car Stuffing event. Mechanics simplified, the organization who stuffs the most number of people inside a car wins a hefty ten thousand pesos. One organization, UP ICTUS, had been winning the contest for the past four years. This year, thirteen organizations participated, and through a tie-breaker round, UP CURSOR took home the honor and the prized sum. They fit in thirty people inside the vehicle. UP ICTUS finished second.

Interestingly, a few years ago, our car stuffing event was co-sponsored by my student political party’s rival party, which from then on earned our event the traditional criticism, from my friends, of being irrelevant. Hehe. Admittedly, sans all the other events and activities with hints of social relevance, we do our car stuffing event largely and simply because it’s really just fun.

This year, we also had a Food Stuffing activity as an intermission event. The team of four who finishes a plateful of spaghetti, cakes, pansit, among other foodstuffs the fastest, wins three thousand pesos. A team from the College of Arts and Letters won.

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The fourteen hours of sleep I just had is an indicator of how many sleepless nights I’ve had the past weeks. I can finally say, nakabawi rin ako sa tulog. Thank God it’s almost over. I barely realized, pasko na pala.

This is the first time I felt that being invited to too many Christmas gatherings can be a little stressful. It feels quite sinful, how I’ve been overeating and drinking night after night after night, knowing well how millions of other people in this country have barely anything to eat. If Christmas is a time for joy and merry-making, it is indeed and ironically also a time that awfully reminds us of how tragically disproportionate the concentration of wealth and opportunities are in our society.