My friend Donnel turned a year older on the second of April, but it wasn’t until last week that we were able to celebrate it with him. He treated my friends and I to lunch in Greenfield’s Mano-Mano, and after an hour or so we headed to the latest coffee shop in Zamboanga, 3rd Cup.

Meeting up with my friends was fun, but sad as well because Chris wasn’t there. He was too busy working, that workaholic.

I finally realized why a lot of people come to 3rd cup. I was truly baffled the first time I came here, because the food sucked (and still does). It turns out that not only does 3rd cup have free (and fast) wifi, they also lend laptops at P25 per hour. What a steal!

I’m coming over a lot more often from now on! :)

My friend Heidee, who recently started working in Singapore, came home to Zamboanga about a week ago for a short visit. Of course, where should we hang out but my favorite new place to hang out, Astoria Regency!

It was high noon when we got to the hotel and it was sooo freakin’ hot. Maybe 36 degrees Celsius. Or worse. We had to order shakes ASAP. In fact, we each had two. I got corn shake, Gim had mango shake and Heids ordered what looks to be a watermelon shake. And then we ate lunch (calamares, lengua de baca and baked clams with garlic rice).

We were supposed to meet up with Jotie, Donnel, Brian and Chris. But they all had excuses reasons for not coming so it ended up just the three of us. (Just like old times, no, Heids? ^-^)

Here are some photos we took of that day. (Sorry for the low quality, I only brought a camphone. I no longer lug my camera around Zamboanga City for security reasons.)

It was a mighty fun day. Heidee fed me the latest chika from her side of the class pool, and I fed Heidee the latest fibs from mine. Sorry about that, Heids! :)

Gim and I had a spectacular lunch today. Curacha cooked in coconut milk and Alavar sauce. Divine!

Curacha is a type of crab commonly found in the waters of Zamboanga. As such it’s available in the city markets round the clock. I would love to eat it as regularly as I eat lechon (roasted pork, goes very well with a Sunday) but unfortunately my cook is a bit allergic to crustaceans. He gets hives all over, and hyperacidic, when he eats too much crab or shrimp. So I have to wait several weeks in between curacha fests.

Today happened to be my lucky day. I slept in the whole morning and when I woke up, Chef Gim had already gone to the market, bought three large curachas and whipped up my favorite Guinataang Curacha in Alavar sauce! Yummy! So good it deserves to be on the menu of a five-star New York City hotel.

Alavar is a famous seafood restaurant in Zamboanga City, and they sell Alavar sauce, which is a secret concoction of aligue and spices. Whatever they put it in it, it’s sinfully delicious and makes every seafood dish doubly tasty.

In Chavacano, Curacha means “cockroach”, but the similarity between the two creatures ends in their furry-looking legs. Curacha is a wonderfully tasty crustacean. It is meatier and much cleaner than the mud crab, though ironically with a slightly earthier taste, and it’s meat a little less smooth but just as juicy. However the difference in taste is very subtle and I am sure most people would not be able to differentiate the two without checking their shells. I’m not yet sure which I favor more, the mud crab or the curacha, so I prefer to have them both in one dish!

Jump inside to see more photos of today’s lunch, and Chef Gim’s simple Guinataang Curacha in Alavar Sauce recipe below.

How to Make Guinataang Curacha (or Crab) in Alavar Sauce

Ingredients:
1 kilo curacha or crab
1/2 kilo grated coconut
1/2 kilo Alavar sauce
 1 bulb of garlic
1/2 thumb of ginger
4 pinches of salt
4 pinches of monosodium glutamate (Ajinomoto)
1 1/2 cup of water

Wash curacha or crab. Place in cooking pot. Set aside.

Place grated coconut in a mixing bowl. Pour water and mix. With your hands, squeeze all milk from the coconut. Set aside.

Mince garlic and ginger into tiny pieces. Set aside.

Sprinkle the salt, Ajinomoto, garlic and ginger all over the curacha or crab.

Pour coconut milk all over the curacha or crab.

Turn stove on high heat until the coconut milk comes to a boil. Then drop the alavar sauce into the pot and lower the knob to medium heat. When the coconut oil starts to surface (happens after around 20-30 minutes), turn off the stove.

Serve.

P.S. If you don’t have Alavar sauce, go right ahead and do the recipe without it. It will just be Guinataang Curacha, then.

I don’t remember uploading these photos of the last time I was in Dapitan, Zamboanga del Norte. That was about three months ago. Although I do not miss my very poor living quarters there, I do miss the beautiful, relaxing sights of Dapitan.

Nature never let you forget her majesty in Dapitan. It was easy to just let the romantic days wrap themselves all over you… ’til you forgot that there was more to living than the here and now.

So… enjoy these photos. :)

The first solar eclipse of 2009 fell on January 26 (coincidentally, the Chinese New Year) and I was there to see it firsthand. Lucky for me I live on the edge of the Philippines, in Zamboanga City, Mindanao. At 4pm Monday, I parked on one of the benches along the coast, armed with my Canon S5 IS and some old floppy disks, then started shooting.

None of the photos below have been altered save for some resizing (the original pics are too high-res), bordering and watermarking. Take a look!

The Red Series

I don’t have a high class IR filter for my camera, or anything like that. All I did to be able to capture the solar eclipse in photo was to dig out one of my dad’s old floppy disks, take out the black film thingy from inside it and then manually hod the film in front of the lens of my camera. How very old-school, huh? :)

All photos below are arranged in the order of when they were taken (mostly).

The Black and White Series

The Mixed Series

I find I like this series best. Using the floppy film brought out the solar eclipse but it also blacked out everything else. I liked just covering part of my lens with the filter so my camera could capture the ocean in full color.

This woman had no idea there was a solar eclipse behind her. In fact, very few people knew. There was this one guy who seemed frustrated that his DSLR + zoom lens + very long hood could not capture the eclipse. He kept stomping around in vain. There was a family of three who were trying to see the sun without so much as a pair of sunglasses to block the sun’s rays, so I have no idea if they were actually able to see the eclipse. Most people were just enjoying the sunset, like any normal day. Very surreal.

The Non-Series

No filters were used for the non-series. As you can(not) see, it was next to impossible to see the solar eclipse with bare eyes. But I liked the way that my camera somehow captured the reflection of the partial eclipse. :) Very pretty. The eclipse was only visible during the last few seconds of the sunset. Unfortunately, the sun petered out before it reached total eclipse. :-(

A Nice Day at The Beach

The Props and Photog

Yup, that’s me in the second and third pics. People were passing by, looking at me with a funny look. I must have seemed quite strange, hahaha. And… that’s Zamboanga City’s busy coastline in the last pic.

Click the pictures for bigger resolutions!

It was a fun day! I love solar eclipses! :-) Do you have photos of the solar eclipse? Leave a link!

If you liked this post, please digg! Thank you!

On January 26, the year 2009 will experience its first solar eclipse. Greatest eclipse will be witnessed by those in the Indian Ocean and western Indonesia, while a partial eclipse will be experienced by those in the southern third of Africa, Madagascar, Australia. Partial phases of the eclipse will be visible from southern Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia and Indonesia.

To check if you will be able to see the eclipse from your city, check this PDF file for the circumstances of the solar eclipse across the world. All times are in Universal Time and you may have to convert to your local time. You can use this time converter.

NASA describes the solar eclipse as such:

The annular path begins in the South Atlantic at 06:06 UT when the Moon’s antumbral shadow meets Earth and forms a 363 kilometre wide corridor. Traveling eastward, the shadow quickly sweeps south of the African continent, missing it by approximately 900 kilometres. Slowly curving to the northeast the path crosses the southern Indian Ocean. Greatest eclipse^[1] takes place at 07:58:39 UT when the eclipse magnitude^[2] will reach 0.9282. At this instant, the annular duration is 7 minutes 54 seconds, the path width is 280 kilometres and the Sun is 73° above the flat horizon formed by the open ocean. The central track continues northeast where it finally encounters land in the form of the Cocos Islands and onward to southern Sumatra and western Java (Figure 2). At 09:40 UT, the central line duration is 6 minutes 18 seconds and the Sun’s altitude at 25°. In its final minutes, the antumbral shadow cuts across central Borneo and clips the northwestern edge of Celebes before ending just short of Mindanao, Philippines at 09:52 UT.

I converted the UT times in the NASA report and so, in Philippine time, the annular eclipse begins on January 26 at 2:06 PM. The shadow begins in the South Atlantic and slowly crosses to the southern Indian ocean.

Greatest eclipse, or the point when the distance between the Moon’s shadow axis and Earth’s geocentre reaches a minimum, is achieved by 3:58 PM. That means this is the point when the moon reaches its maximal covering of the sun. Greatest eclipse will have a duration of 7 minutes and 54 seconds.

At 5:40 PM Philippine time, the annular eclipse hovers above southern Sumatra and western Java. This will last 6 minutes and 18 seconds. The solar eclipse will end just short of Mindanao at 5:52 PM.

This paints a pretty dismal picture for the Philippines. It seems that we will not be able to see the solar eclipse at all if it ends before it even reaches Mindanao.

However, upon looking at the PDF file I mentioned earlier, the solar eclipse will be visible to Manila, Philippines at UT 8:55 or 4:55 PM. Malaysia will experience it earlier at UT 8:32 or 4:30 PM. Zamboanga, midpoint of Malaysia and Manila, will probably experience the solar eclipse somewhere between 4:30 and 4:55 PM.

Greatest eclipse will visit Manila, Malaysia and Zamboanga by 5:51 PM. Only Kuala Lumpur will see the solar eclipse end by 6:59 PM (sunset in KL is at 7:25 PM) because Zamboanga and Manila’s solar eclipse will be prematurely cut by dusk (sunset in Manila is at 5:52 PM and sunset in Zamboanga is 5:58 PM).

So, the last question on my mind is, will the weather conditions in Zamboanga permit me to have a cloudfree, fun solar eclipse experience? Ay, the answer might be no, what with these rainy days. Weather prediction for Zamboanga City on that day is scattered thunderstorms day and night. Oh noes. (Even Manila will fare only slightly better).

Still, you’ll see me camping out by Cawa-cawa on January 26, as early as 2 PM, just to be sure. (Okay, maybe not, midafternoon is pretty hot unless it’s a cloudy day.) And I’ll be there until sunset! (Okay, unless the rain chases me away.)

* * * * *

The last time I experienced a solar eclipse was when I was 6 years old. That was the morning of March 18, 1988. I was so excited, and my whole family, my cousins and uncles and aunties, and most especially my dad. Everyone had been talking about it for days beforehand.

My dad, he prepared a big piece of glass for me, and taught me to rub charcoal all over it ’till it stained. He did the same thing for himself. Our neighbors were doing it too. And then we all collectively waited for the solar eclipse. It was like we were all holding our breath.

I remember feeling so giddy and scared and excited, waiting. And then it started, the shadow creeping at the edges of the sun. It was amazing, breathtaking. I held the tinted glass up against the sky and watched in awe. I will never forget that feeling of wonder, of magic.

It was such a beautiful, poignant moment in my life. And a very nice memory of my dad and how much I loved him…

* * * * *

January 26 is going to be an amazing day! :-)

This sucks. For the last three days, I have not been able to stay updated with the news much, or blog much, or surf much, or drop much, or do much of anything that needs the use of electricity. Ugh!

Early Saturday morning (at 2:25 AM), MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) rebels bombed a Transco steel tower in Barangay Tingin-Tingin, Kauswagan, Lanao del Norte. The targeted steel tower is instrumental in delivering power to the entire Zamboanga Peninsula (including the provinces of Zamboanga del Norte and Zamboanga del Sur, and of course Zamboanga City) and parts of Lanao del Norte.

Affected power companies are Ladeco (powering Lanao), Zaneco (powering Zamboanga del Norte), Zamsureco (powering Zamboanga del Sur) and Zamcelco (powering Zamboanga City).

Transco released the following statement:

The 100 megawatt power plant of the Western Mindanao Power Corporation in Sangali, this city [Zamboanga City] immediately shifted to island mode operation after the isolation of Zamboanga Peninsula early dawn today.The “island mode” supply from the power plant successfully reached Transco’s Sangali and Sta. Clara Substations first, then was extended to Aurora Substation as soon as the voltage condition permitted around 9 a.m. Aurora Substation feeds power to the provinces of Zamboanga del Norte, Zamboanga del Sur, Misamis Occidental and part of Lanao del Norte.

It’s a good thing that Zamboanga City has an extra power plant to cope with the Transco bombing. Currently, the Western Mindanao Power Corporation in Sangali is powering the whole Zamboanga Peninsula. Unfortunately, it was not designed to handle such a large customer base, so power is being rotated among the affected areas.

I’ve been monitoring the blackouts these past two days, and power is rotated every two hours. The power just came back at 5:00 PM, so it’s going to go out again by 7:00, and will return by 9:00. I’ve not been sleeping well at all. And I’ve not been able to do much work. Hayyyy.

The blackouts are supposed to last two to three days. Hopefully power will be restored by Wednesday at the latest.

Anyone care to start a vigilante group???

There’s a new tourist trap in town. And it may be successful, too. Just look at these wonderful photos I was able to take of the government’s current pet project, Paseo del Mar (literally Passage of the Ocean), a park built strategically in the old part of town; to the left of it the historic Fort Pilar and to the right the first hotel Lantaka: Paseo del Mar stands right at the edge of Zamboanga City.

The park is still in its building stage, so you will see piles of bricks, unpaved ground and unfinished structures. Locals and visitors alike are not allowed into the premises yet, but we were able to secure entrance by promising to write about Paseo. (And, erm, maybe not mentioning the avenue of the write-up.)

There are so many pictures I cannot caption them all, so, enjoy the photos!

How about some landscapes? :-)

Here is Gim showing off our (not-so-)new motorcycle, Sebastian. (We sold Pao earlier this year.)

We were there (supposedly) on an official manner, so even though I was tempted to have my boyfriend take portraits of me in every corner of Paseo, I had to resist, haha. We refrained ourselves from photowhoring and instead opted for these two simple shots. >.<

And here is my most favorite shot of all. :)

Happy Holidays!

I meant to upload these much sooner, but I was waiting for my next chance to photograph the lights of Zamboanga City, as I had not taken any of the beautifully lighted Christmas tree in the center of the city nor of the townhall lights in the surrounding barangays like Pasonanca or Sta. Maria.

Unfortunately the holiday season is ending soon and by the time I finish my shoots New Year may well be over, so without further ado, here are my twilight shots of Zamboanga City Hall. Enjoy! :-)

The people of Zamboanga City speak the Chavacano language, the base language of which is Spanish. Thus, on Christmas, we greet each other “Felices Pascuas” (Merry Christmas) and in the dawn of the New Year, we say “Prospero Año Nuevo” (A Prosperous New Year).

Frontal view of Zamboanga City Hall. The lights are truly more impressive this year than last. And I thought we were in recession? ;-)

That’s me posing in front of the Belen, also known as a nativity scene.

My boyfriend Gim pretending to offer something to a shepherd. (I think…) You can see a Jollibee franchise right behind us. It started out as only a small business opportunity but now it’s the Philippines’ version of McDonalds. :-P

Plaza Pershing lighted up. And Gim smack dab in the middle of it all.

A tree filled with lights. I love to see trees filled with Christmas decorations. I couldn’t quite capture the beauty of this one, though. The light was dying… :-(

My boyfriend wishing he were as tall as the camel. Ahh, me too. I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!!! Wishing you all a Prospero Año Nuevo! :-)

My friend Ja is holding a Christmas party for the kids over at the orphanage in Talon-Talon, Zamboanga City on the 28th. She’s got the food and gifts all taken care of and just needs people to help her manage the children, like feed them or help them open their gifts. She says they can get pretty rowdy, so she’s roping us into helping her. Haha.

I’m going, and so are most of my friends. If you’re a Berchie or maybe you know one of us, come and help out, okay? The shelter is right before the elementary school, you won’t miss it.

If you have stuff to donate like textbooks, clothes, cans of food, or better yet, toys, that would be great, too! :-)