Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Fiesta Time in The Philippines!

One of the very most enjoyable things to experience in The Philippines is the celebrations for fiesta which every province, city, town barangay and village seems to participate in at one time or another… sometimes even multiple times in a year for various reasons! Filipinos can be extravagant party makers when it comes to fiesta time. There are even events where the preparations will take months and months to execute and sometimes even upwards of a year. If perhaps you have seen some videos of the more popular island-wide fiestas that occur each and every year involving a multitude of extraordinary entries you will get a sense of what I’m talking about. But I am getting ahead of myself, because I also want to impart what fiesta is like on the micro level, just down the road at the local barangay.

Once you attend a local fiesta event, even at the provincial or municipal/city level, you will find that every resident makes it their personal duty to participate as if they are all personally the birthday celebrants of the event. Everyone feels as if they should go to the extreme on the feasting, drinking, karaoke, games, watching laugh-inducing Vice Ganda movies (click here: http://viceganda.cwh5.com/) and much more. Everyone wants to wake up early to get started on the celebrations after staying up until the late, late hours. I have seen that all the residents in the locality invite and expect all their friends and family from near and far to come to their place to help them celebrate and make the event seem more complete for everyone, even house-hopping to the neighbor’s places to not miss a thing!

And of course you should be ready to be amazed by the variety and abundance of foods prepared by every household for the fiesta. You just have to try out everything before you when you get to a new table and start filling your plate. Filipinos have their own dishes that you will find in abundance that are a treat to explore. Just a few of the staple dishes are Caldereta, Paksiw and Pochero. As well you are sure to find plenty of Adobo, Humba, Macaroni Salads and copious amounts of rice to go with it all.

Throughout the whole of The Philippines once the fiesta season has descended for any particular locality, the whole town becomes your own family at this time. People will travel great distances to come together for this special annual event to spend time once again with their old friends and of course family. Even sometimes family members working abroad will travel home just for this time together. This is a time when it really does come down to the sharing, the love and the celebrations of life and family. My first visit to The Philippines was just such a memorable event, when I met people who have remained close ever since. That first impression of being brought into everyone’s homes and being pushed to try all the foods was not to be soon forgotten. I also remember the first Holy Week that I spent in the country, when again it is a time of very special closeness with family and old friends. As a Westerner I was totally amazed to find on a weekday morning at about 8 am that there was no TV broadcast available on one of the major national outlets. Why, I asked? The answer was simply that there were probably not enough of the necessary people to run a broadcast who had shown up for work yet because of the festivities at their own homes

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