Wala Lang After a heavy rain, I avoid España in front of UST, Araneta Avenue by Talayan Village, Taft Avenue, and San Luis. I learn something new, however, with each typhoon. Yoling taught me to avoid Quezon Memorial Circle near PHILCOA—she trapped me there for three hours. My daughter now knows...
A tour of heritage houses in Batangas, Bicol, Bulacan, and Boac Wala Lang … there’s no place like home. Most unusual was a Taal (Batangas) bahay-na-bato that was a bahay kubo in disguise. You wouldn’t notice the masquerade from outside. The home had the usual stone-walled ground floor and...
Wala Lang … there’s no place like an ancestral home. With the end of the Galleon Trade in 1815, the Spanish colonial government embarked on structural reform. Foreign trade, heretofore restricted to Spain and her colonies, was opened to other countries. Commercial agriculture was prioritized...
Wala Lang Join this author check out homes humble and grand whenever he can, wherever he goes. He’s been at it for over 50 years and his tally is close to 100, from Batanes down to Mindanao. … friends like to visit each others’ homes. Once or twice when I was about age five, Nanay gave in to...
Wala Lang A survey conducted by the OECD Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) of 15-year-olds from 79 countries revealed that our youth are at the bottom among other things in comprehension and reasoning ability, meaning that their decisions tend to be based on personalities and...
Wala Lang A country’s economic performance is normally expressed as the value of goods and services produced during the year, and growth rate by comparing that figure with that of the preceding year. Those figures, known as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), are measured either as (a) the total value...
Wala Lang Small pieces of paper, tiny bits of metal—neither is edible nor useful but people work, fight, kill for them. Paper money and coins are the subject of Yaman: History and Heritage in Philippine Money , a weighty tome just published by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Authored by...
Wala Lang From where I sit on a round Vienna bentwood table, I see a papag with a couple of orinola s underneath, a wall of paintings and two shelves of santos, a Maranao chess set, a pair of Chinese cloisonne vases, a tortoise shell salakót , three Quing Dynasty vases, a biombo , a doctor’s...
Wala Lang Neither Wall Street nor PSE can beat the Manila art auction record. I watched on Facebook live the other week’s Leon Gallery auction and record after record toppled. At prices in the millions (P7.5 million per basket of Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s painting, Women with Baskets, Fish and...
Wala Lang Journalist Andrew J. Masigan points out the alarming results of a survey conducted by the OECD Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) of some 600,000 15-year-olds from 79 countries. Filipino teenagers ranked last in ability to comprehend lengthy narratives, to deal with...
Wala Lang Early on Easter Sunday morning, March 31, 1521, Magellan sent some men ashore to prepare a suitable place. Some 50 men including Magellan followed, dressed in their Sunday best. Six muskets fired as they stepped ashore and were greeted by Chiefs Kulambo and Siaui. The two were brothers,...
Wala Lang Mactan was not an impressive place in the 16th century. As late as 44 years after Magellan’s stay, Miguel López de Legaspi found Mactan “swampy, largely inhospitable, and sparsely inhabited” by “some 300 indios in four or five small settlements.” It was strategically located...
