The time difference between Cebu City and Chicago is fifteen hours. That means that, literally, our days and nights are flipped upside-down. The last time I was in Manila, twelve years ago, I landed on an evening flight and slept the entire next day sprawled out on my cousin’s bed. So, I expected the same would happen here. It’s no big deal. You just sleep it off and then adjust to the, albeit huge leap, in time zone.

But every journey’s different and when we landed last Thursday, it was 5:30 a.m. Manila time. We got to the Manila Airport Hotel, our stop-over before heading out to Cebu on Friday afternoon. We were tired, but very, very excited. And wide awake. This was unexpected.

So, instead of sleeping off the day, we called our relatives and met them earlier than anticipated. We crammed Auntie M, Uncle E, Uncle C, Auntie E and our own little family of three into our air-conditioned hotel room and caught up on family stories. It was a great impromptu reunion!

This was the first time Alan and Boy-boy had met any of them. As Alan said later, clearly tickled, “You’re relatives are so cute! Every one of them!” Uncle E has the smooth, deep voice of a radio announcer. He and Auntie M kept making these jokes about getting older. She said, “You always think of yourself as young.” And he adds, “Until – until somebody calls you Tatang.” Which is an affectionate term for elder, or father. “Soon,” said Uncle E, “I will be Lolo (grandfather.) And after that? SUPER Lolo.” I don’t if this translates. Part of the humor is in Uncle E’s delivery.

Filipinos here seem also alternately surprised and amused that Alan can speak Tagalog. They look at him with his blue eyes and pale skin, his beard and American clothes and don’t expect him to say things like, “Magandang umaga! Meron po kayo nang Globe Card?” (Globe is a company that provides calling time on cell phones.) We love seeing people’s reaction at the seeming incongruity. Mostly, it’s fun to mess with people’s expectations.

But anyway, back to the point I was trying to make with this blog entry: Jetlag threw off my blog writing time considerably, which is why I’m having to play catch-up. Here’s an excerpt from my journal: “If you’ve never had jetlag before, it feels something like this – When you’re standing still, the earth sways beneath your feet like a ship’s deck riding a huge swell. Can anyone say queasy?” We felt this way for maybe 4 days. Now, the queasy feeling is gone.

My body had fallen into a rhythm of falling asleep at around 8 or 9 p.m. Cebu City time. I’d wake up at 3 or 4 a.m., read, research, and generally think through my action plan for the upcoming day. Then, I’d get exhausted by 5 a.m. Back to bed for another hour or hour-and-a-half of sleep. Usually, I was wide awake by 6:30 and we’re out to breakfast at around 7 or 7:30.

I’ve learned since our last trip to Greece, that it’s best to follow my body’s rhythm. The jetlag isn’t something you necessarily have to fight. Your body finds its own way of marking time. Waking up at 4 a.m. to work hasn’t been so bad. In fact, it’s the time of day when the entire family is quiet. I’ve been waking up at that time with my thoughts cogent and research questions clear and realizations about the previous day’s work come easily in the tahimik, the peace of early morning.

So, let’s see how many entries I can put online this morning to catch up. It’s 6 a.m. in Cebu City now. To our friends and family in the States: Have a great dinner!

There are about 900 people here in the domestic terminal for Cebu Pacific Airlines. Lots of noise. A cacophony of voices. It’s the most # of non-Asians I’ve seen in 3 days. Passengers are loading for places like Boracay and Cagayan de Oro and Legaspi. Our driver from the Manila Hotel to Cebu Pacific told us it was summer vacation. All the schools are out and everyone’s heading out to the provinces. (The line to the women’s CR/Comfort Room is 25 people long!)

Standing in line earlier waiting 40 minutes to check in, I felt like I was in an Isabel Allende novel. There was a Catholic nun in full habit. Muslim women who wrapped their hair in beautiful floral scarves and wore long skirts. This whole crowd seems overtly religious, more than what I’m used to in the States. Even here, in the boarding area, there is a lit shrine to Mama Mary flanked on the right by a portrait of Jesus and on the left by 2 other religious portraits. I ran into an Australian fiction writer, a beautiful young Caucasian woman who teaches yoga in Quezon City. Most of the foreigners, most everyone really, look ready for vacation — sunglasses and broad-rimmed straw hats, fanny packs. For the Euro/American/Australian travelers, there are IPOD’s. There’s a group of 13-year-old-looking girls and boys from a national javelin throwing team. Lots of families with babies sucking water from plastic bottles.

So far, on our travels, we’ve personally seen 1 major Filipino actress-singer, Vina Morales, and a senatorial hopeful named Richard Gomez, nicknamed Richard “Goma” (like rubberband in Tagalog) who looked a head taller than most of us Filipinos and waltzed into the terminal like a movie star touting glam sunglasses and flanked by an entourage. Most of the time, I don’t know who the celebrity is (since I am not local). But this is how I recognize them: First, an excited buzz starts in the throng. You hear 2 or 3 people say the star’s name excitedly. When folks start pulling out their cell phone cameras for pics with the person, then you know it’s someone famous. Hmmm…that’s 2 plane rides and 2 famous people. We’re 2 for 2! *laugh*

I’m hesitant to say anything even remotely critical of the Philippines, especially to my American friends, because so many people Stateside don’t have the love for my ancestral home or culture the way my family does. It’s easy to look at the squatter camps (read: the hand-built refuges of families who would otherwise be nomadic and homeless) and turn our collective American noses up. Or to say to ourselves, Poor them. And, how lucky we are, in some inadvertent condescension. But disparity in the Philippines, just like disparity in Chicago or L.A. or San Francisco, or Rio de Janeiro, disturbs me.

I suppose the Chicago equivalent to this SM Mall of Asia versus the Street Beggars of Pasig struggle is the Magnificent Mile where there are the gleaming two-story shop windows of Ann Taylor and Eddie Bauer or Nike Town and Virgin Records. And yet, a few years ago, Mayor Daley had swept Chicago’s homeless people out of Lower Wacker. Having served food to my local homeless folks, it’s hard to say the disparities in Manila are too different from those in the major U.S. cities I love, like Sweet Home Chicago (which I am also hesitant to say anything critical of because I love the people and the Lake and the unique neighborhoods of our city).

One thing my days in Berkeley anthropology taught me is that when we travel, it is as if we take two journeys simultaneously: a journey abroad and a journey home. Both journeys get us to re-examine our assumptions. Ten years ago, I would have been fixated on the differences between America and the Philippines. But these days, maybe because I’m getting older (I said older, not wiser!), maybe my mind and spirit are more engaged with seeing humanity as a whole. What do we, as a species, do to one another? How can we make it snow inside a massive shopping-an when people are literally starving outside in the streets of Manila? How can we spend a million plus on Millenium Park and not spend the equivalent on helping Chicago’s homeless folks find sustainable work, the basics of food and medicine, and a clean, simple place to sleep from day to day?

For me, journeys often open up more questions than they answer. Personally, I love the big questions. With big questions we’re given the chance to grow and transform. And what’s life without transformation?

This is a sound my family has co-opted for its own use. As in, “Uh-oh, my R2-D2 toy just fell off the table. BLOG-OG!” Or, say, we’re driving through the coastal countryside of Cebu and something bounces off the top of our van(which it did) and we say, “Uh-oh, BLOG-OG! Must be a coconut falling from the tree!” Or, say, Boy-boy has a great hand in Gin and throws his last card on the table. It’s a perfectly GREAT time to exclaim: BLOG-OG!

In the case of cyberspace, we really like it that the word BLOG so closely resembles the Filipino sound of coconuts falling. *laugh* Blog pages falling from our keyboard out onto the net.So that’s our new silliness. BLOG-OG!