From The Real Farm to The Real Market!

In Seoul, I am lucky to have the biggest fruit and vegetable market north of the Han River right in my neighborhood. I could easy get the cheapest and freshest fruits by just walking down the street.

Here in my hometown in the Philippines, I was surprised to find a similar market, though not as big, that sells the cheapest fruits and vegetables! And you can even haggle!

Market day here is actually Sunday, but the trick is to visit the market the night before when the farmers bring their fresh produce to the area, although I was told some of the farmers arrive as early as Friday night. These farmers come from the other side of the island, and some even speak another dialect.

They have mangoes, papayas, soursops, bananas, pineapples, yams, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and a lot of vegetables for your dishes and salads!

I was amazed that those huge papayas were selling PHP15 per kilo! And you can just imagine how many papaya shakes I was able to make out of them!

My primary targets are usually bananas, papayas, mangoes and tomatoes. For my tomatoes, I just slice them up, bathe them in olive oil and sprinkle them with sea salt. 

And since the people selling the produce at the market are the farmers themselves, you can query them about just anything about his or her produce. You can ask whether they're really organic or not, or ask them how many more days do you need to wait before a huge papaya you're buying ripens.

I'm heading to the market tonight, and I'm wondering what fruits they will have brought from their farms again.

A Pinoy @ The Movies: La La Land

This is a movie about every aspiring actor's Hollywood dream. Maybe that's why it connected with a lot of Hollywood people. And it's a song and dance, too!

Emma Stone's character Mia is an aspiring actress just like Reneé Zellweger's character Roxy Hart in Chicago. But unlike Roxy Hart, Mia didn't have to kill anybody; she just had to fall in love with Ryan Gosling's Sebastian, a pianist also struggling to find real work in Los Angeles, or LA, short, thus LA-LA in the title, or perhaps, it's the la-la-la singing when one is in love.

The story line is pretty neat and simple: struggling boy meets struggling girl, both try to figure out how to achieve their dreams, both succeed, and they live happily ever after. Or did they?

As the most scenes were shot in Los Angeles, it reminded me of my LA visit where my fellow movie buff, Roselyn, toured me around. We had fun pretending to be struggling actors ourselves while we were driving around Hollywood, where she lives. 

La La Land is a very 'easy' movie to watch, no heavy thinking required like Chicago, as its songs were fun and life as actor seemed easy. Mia could actually get by in an expensive city by working as a barista! Hmm. That gives me an idea. Ha-ha-ha!

The last song-and-dance film that won the Oscar Best Picture was Chicago in 2002, where Catherin Zeta-Jones won best supporting actress.

Will La La Land win best picture, too? Let's sing and dance to that!

A Pinoy @ The Movies: Great Wall

This movie isn't a travel documentary about China's five-thousand-mile-long fortress, which Donald Trump wanted to duplicate in North America to keep away Mexican tourists. It is a fantasy version of a Chinese tour documentary on how to enjoy a side trip to the Great Wall when you visit Beijing.

It's always entertaining to watch these fantasy movies which use historical elements as their jump-off point. And Great Wall is one of them.

Great Wall is about a fictional monster that plagued China every 60 years thousands of years ago, and this monster happened to be the main reason why the Great Wall of China was built. History books would tell us the main purpose of the Wall was to keep nomads away. This movie tells us, however, that these 'nomads' were actually monsters which wanted to devour villages in China.   

At the start of the film, Matt Damon and his sidekick were being chased by Chinese bandits along some slopes which looked like the rainbow mountains of the Zhangye Danxia Landform Geological Park. I thought it would have been amazing on screen if they actually featured those colored mountains, but I doubted if it was logistically possible for the whole production to shoot scenes on those colored slopes with galloping horses and bow-and-arrow warriors. I wonder if the Chinese government would want those ecological wonders to be disturbed.

Aside from the captivating computer-generated images of the battles between man and monster, I was especially impressed in how well the Chinese soldiers, both men and women, dressed up for the war! Their costumes were perfectly tailored in very leathery fabric and chic designs. I guess, if these Chinese warriors and soldiers had to die in battle, they would at least die in haute couture. 

Other than Matt Damon, familiar faces in the movie include Willen Dafoe and Lu Han, a former member of EXO, a Korean boy band, who played a clumsy young soldier. Of course, it's part of the marketing ploy that, in order to attract young viewers for the movie, they should cast an actor who's popular with the young. 

And with EXO's millions of fans in Asia, it shouldn't be a surprise if most of the ticket sales were generated by these young screaming girls, who also happened to be screaming their lungs out when I was at Incheon International Airport on the day EXO was flying to another country.

But you won't be screaming if you watch Great Wall (unless you're Lu Han's fan). You will just be entertained by battle acrobatics, stunts, costumes, and how you'd be able to appreciate a virtual tour of the Great Wall of China by simply buying a movie ticket.


Enjoy!