Bayfield Apple Festival

Fair Food.

THE UMD International Club needed a volunteer driver, so I was volunteered...to drive five math majors--four Chinese and one Indonesian--plus myself to the premiere apple festival of the Northland. We all had heard of the Apple Festival but still did not know what to expect. Every apple product known to man? People speaking in apple cliches? People dressed in nothing but apples with parts of their bodies in apple pies? Ahermm...

Anyhoo, after two hours of driving (and taking the wrong exit out of the Bong Bridge in Superior and ending up in Duluth once more), we finally parked the UMD van in one of the orchards offering free parking. At a big barn, there was a wine-tasting event. I felt bad because I couldn't chug some apple wine. Me being the driver. Outdoors, an old man was giving kids donkey rides. This is something I would have enjoyed were I younger. But seeing as I was much bigger now than the donkeys, I moved on. There was kettlecorn (sweet pop corn?) and various other apple products for sale. The math kids and I agreed to meet here after five hours for our drive home.


Paper hats.

DOWNTOWN, there was a concert at an open stage and lots of stalls selling jams, sandwiches, pies, taffy, salad dressing, and various fried food. There were stalls selling various Northland products too, like wool hats, scarves and gloves, fisherman-themed trinkets, miracle oils, and crafts. No rhyme or reason for the type of products being sold. One stall was only selling spatulas. Cute-looking, pastel colored spatulas. (Throughout the day, I was thinking that maybe we do need an extra spatula at home.)


Norwegian Humor.

Cecilia and I drifted toward the aroma of frying cheese curds. And so, $5 poorer, I finally got to taste Minnesota's state fair favorite...It was okay. Pampanga sisig is better and clogs up the arteries faster. Cecilia bought an onion blossom. It reminded me of sea anemone, but I ate some anyway.


Cecilia and her Onion Blossom.

Once in a while we bumped into the other math majors. It seems we were the only Asians wandering around Bayfield that day. Someone asked us if we were all related. "Of course we are," I snapped. "We are all the children of Buddha!"..Just kidding. I didn't say that.


Apple Peeling Contest.

We ran into Ran and Wenji who were about to compete in the Apple Peeling contest. And, they lost. Because no sooner had they started peeling away, when we all noticed that their local competition hadn't started peeling. They were instead carving thin strips on their apples which they would eventually pry loose. The defending champion was a Wisconsin surgeon. Ah well! Maybe next year. Ran and Wenjie got interviewed by the local paper, so that was fun.


Wenji's apple peel.

Cecilia and I walked around the other part of town and discovered that that was were the good food was. Cajun food, apple pies, apple tarts, apple brats (???), smoked salmon, steak wraps, fish boil (???). But by that time, we had no room in our tummies. So we just enjoyed the aromas and considered our last minute purchases.

I saw a huge container of cranberries. Shocked into compliance, I bought 5 lbs of it at $1/ pound. Cecilia decided that she needed a spatula at home.


Cranberry Shock.

Back at the shuttle stop, we met with the other Math majors and discovered that they had bought cranberries too, thinking one can snack on them on the way home. However, cranberries--they discovered--are extremely sour. We were advised by locals to make cranberry sauce out of them and to "google" the recipe.

Driving back to Duluth, we enjoyed the burnished look of sunset on changing trees. The math majors talked about Mathematica while I, the only Environmental Education major, wished for sisig.


Buddha's Children.


Fishermen Humor.

First Snow

I AM staring out my study window is disbelief. Sizeable snowflakes are falling from the sky. Aaaaaargh!!!!!

Mantra: Snow is good. Snow is good. Snow is good.

Kababata

HFA Glee Club '88. Photo by Dennis Dungo.


Kababata
adj.
childhood friend


IT'S CURIOUS how finding my old classmates here in the US and others in Cyberspace has made me feel less like I'm "floating in space". Wait, maybe this sounds better: I feel more anchored to something that I want to be anchored to.

For a few years, I felt unmoored in Manila. My parents had left for the US, I no longer frequented out family house in Angeles (what was the point?), and holidays were spent frantically trying to think of something to do with Riza O., my fellow "floater". We were orphans: she a literal orphan and I a figurative one. And we created our own siblinghood where there was none. We made our own Christmas traditions.

When I left for grad school in the US, I felt sorry to be leaving Riza. Although I was now closer to my real family, I wasn't sure if we would pick up where we left off eight years ago. Christmas in Las Vegas had been swallowed up by Chiqui's night shift and, of course, it wasn't quite the same without the crazy, baroque and sensory delights of a Manila Christmas.

But who would have thought that the mere cyberpresence of Joanne in Ottawa, Cecille in Pennsylvania, Susan in LA, Shirlyn in Arizona and many other classmates all over the US and still more back in the Philippines would make everything better?

I had congratulated Peter A. in Angeles City on the birth of his first child and had signed my e-mail "ang iyong kababata, Nats". He wrote back saying that that closing phrase gave him a very good feeling. It did taht for me too.

In the strictest sense, kababata is a word used to describe a childhood playmate. But my classmates are more than that. We all may not have been neighbors, but we all grew up together and learned together and received our formation from the same teachers and were watched over by the same nuns. We may not realize it but we are a family of some sort and share memories made more vivid with each retelling.