Adventures of Isabel

Here’s me upon completion of my paper. Note hollow cheeks and black under eyes. Also note elated sense of accomplishment. This is because I know that my Tagalog is not actually good enough to write papers at an academic level, and consequently, my paper will be edited and rewritten for me by a native speaker, [...]

Writing this paper has given me a rather unhappy level of familiarity with the English-Tagalog dictionary written by Father Leo English. While generally acknowledged as the most complete bilingual dictionary, it has some rather irritating flaws.
It is, in essence, 3000 pages of Christian proselytizing. The sample sentences are pretty incredible. [...]

Carabou - emblem of the Philippines. The connotations of the national animal being a creature that spends its life in captivity, laboring in the mud, is best left for others to speculate upon.

Farmers working a rice paddy in Cavite. Not the best composed shot, but something about the convergence of modernity and tradition in [...]

Here’s me windblown and disheveled taking shelter from the monsoons at the Aguinaldo shrine in Cavite. I tried to upload this yesterday, but my computer’s perfomance has been a bit patchy since I’ve been here.
Today was actually the first day for a while that it didn’t rain. De La Salle reopened, and I finally had [...]

I feel like I should post more often, but I’m in such a set routine that there’s not really much to say. I go to school. I have too much work to do. I’m disgruntled. I’m writing a paper about the ways in which early Filipino nationalists manipulated historical narrative to [...]

I’m finally able to connect my computer to the internet, so I’ll start uploading pictures bit by bit over the next few days. Here are all the students (including 2 women who teach Filipino in the states. All women. Note the height difference. Taal Vista, in Tagaytay, Cavite. Taal volcano the collapsed cone [...]

I’m in a better mood now than I was when I wrote the following yesterday afternoon. However, in the interest of historical accuracy, here it is:
I’m typing this right now instead of working, because I can’t get anything else done right now. The battery for my computer ran out while I was working [...]

So, when they said this was an “immersion” program, I assumed they were speaking figuratively. I wasn’t prepared for the actual floods.Which, probably I should have been, since my stay here corresponds pretty much exactly with the rainy season. It rains everyday, but usually only for an hour or so. Today, though, [...]