Sem break in Baguio

            I want to freeze time. If Time were a chocolate bar, it would be locked deep in the inner recesses of our refrigerator.

            I am in Baguio, spending the next several days breathing in the fresh mountain air and recuperating from the sem-that-was, restoring mental and physical health for the sem-to-come. I daresay I am, at this minute, the happiest twenty-one-year-old in the planet. J

            This is not to say that I do not have anything on my to-do list. On the contrary, I have piles of checking waiting for my autograph in red to adorn their pages, as well as a transcription of the Purcell opera DIDO AND AENEAS and what little I remember of our blocking waiting to be typed (this is to aid our Stage Manager, so he can help whip us into shape with our three remaining rehearsals before showtime on Nov. 7 and 8), and a syllabus for Diction 2 (MuPC 111) just begging to take shape (in order to do this, I need to plow through two entire diction textbooks). OOooooooOOOoooh and I also have to compute the grades for my grade school and high school students (thankfully got to finish the college ones before leaving Manila, and thankfully, Montessori CASA students are not graded).

            But on this, my first day in Baguio, I declare that this is NO WORK DAY!

            What a beautiful thing it is to wake up at the ungodly late hour of *gasp* SEVEN O’ CLOCK! And not have to hurry up with breakfast nor one’s bath because there is no appointment to rush off to. Such decadence, such luxury... I feel almost guilty.

            Whenever I go to Baguio, I am not driven (like some more adventurous types) to rush off and have my picture taken at the see-and-be-seen tourist attractions. On the contrary, all I want to do is hole up in our humble abode and plow through my non-academic reading list, preferably with a cup of coffee or a bit of chocolate to nibble on.

            This morning I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Eat, Pray, Love,” which was surprisingly deep and at the same time, utterly enjoyable and light-hearted. It is a mix of Sophia Kinsella and Frances Mayes. It also contains some of the best written food descriptions, which reminds me of “The Food Of Love,” another “appetizing” book by Anthony Capella . No wonder I’ve consumed inordinate amounts of food already, given the short time our family has been up here.

            There is one simple truth about Baguio: Everything tastes so darn good in the highlands! The vegetables are so fresh and crispy, the hot soup makes for a beautiful contrast when taken slowly against the nippy breeze, the coffee is more flavourful, and the tomatoes and fruits are every so much more JUICY. If I wasn’t wearing glasses while eating breakfast this morning, my eyes would have been baptized by a healthy dose of tomato juice which erupted like a mini fountain from a particularly ripe red specimen.

            I have already resigned myself to the fact that I WILL gain weight in Baguio. It is inevitable. But who’s to say that this is necessarily a bad thing?

            Elizabeth Gaskell phrased it well:

            “I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late – through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures – into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person – the magnification of one life – is indeed an act of worth in this world.”

            Substitute “Baguio” for “Italy,” subtract the implied existential angst, and that’s pretty much my battle cry. J I have a camel metaphor I like to use for sem breaks such as this: we are like dromedaries, and sem breaks are our precious opportunities to eat well and store fat in our humps, to prepare for the long stretches of desert that constitute a working person’s life. I’m being melodramatic, of course, but you get my point.

            Am supposed to read Rainier Maria Rilke but I’m feeling too lighthearted to delve too thoroughly into his dark genius, though I must say that the several pages I skimmed made me sigh in sheer awe. I wonder how incredible an experience reading Rilke would be if I actually spoke German, given that I'm already in raptures reading him in Stephen Mitchell's English translation.

             I do not think I can afford to blog here everyday, given that WiFi is a rare and expensive commodity here in Baguio. So here's a shout out to all of my fine Internet friends: Will post comments when I get back to Manila with free wifi! :)

            Have a blessed sem break, everyone!