Baguio Insider

This year April showers came in May, and May flowers are still abloom in June. Summer 2007 came to a close when the school year started yesterday. Although Atenara is still pretty much booked for the weekend, with Balikbayan guests just starting their vacations, and with Koreans coming by the planeload for crash courses in English, Baguio’s “low season” seems to be in high gear, with traffic jams all over the city, and lots and lots of people on the road.

So I start thinking, when do we have more people here — during vacation periods or during the school year? It used to be that starting mid June, Baguio was a ghost town except for convention groups during the 3rd and 4th quarters of the year with Session Road sidewalks pretty empty and clean. But yesterday I went to town and was jostled constantly by throngs of people buying last minute school supplies, office workers, students — on Session, Harrison Road, and the roads west of Burnham Park towards City Hall.

The strawberries are all but gone now — the season is from November to May so all I had this morning was the strawberry taho that magically appeared in Baguio this summer, giving guests an interesting alternative to the regular taho made with molasses and sugar. Today’s taho was just sweetened with strawberry syrup. On good days, strawberry preserves are used. The last batch of fresh strawberries that I bought last week cost a whopping Php250/kilo!

Usually, the first strawberries of the season start selling at PhpPhp80-100/kilo then go down to just Php40 midway (January to March), and prices start climbing in April, because of the rise in demand and because there is way less produce when the rain showers come. At the Strawberry Farm in Trinidad, where can go strawberry-picking, the price of that experience is usually double what it would cost to buy a kilo at the market. The rationale: strawberries are pretty fragile and there is so much wastage when non-professionals harvest them, unlike apple-picking in America.

Due to the light late afternoon rains and the occasional downpours, Baguio is clean and colorful again. The summer dust is gone, the bugs have disappeared (this summer Baguio was “bug-uio” with the most interesting and brightly-colored insects and spiders one will find in the garden, or sometimes inside the house), the horses at Wright Park just work mornings, and the waterfalls on Kennon Road are all impressive again.

June for me had always been the saddest of months. When I was young, it marked the another long year of schooling, and when I moved up to Baguio it used to mean the start of the lean season for all businesses, with rains turning the city gray. But mornings have been pretty sunny recently and no typhoons seem to be in the horizon. Walking around the neighborhood, I was able to get great photos of pretty wild flowers. Of course I don’t know all their names — just the Angel’s Trumpet, that hallucinogenic flora that grows wild in these parts. You see, weeds in Baguio are “medicinal” (ha ha ha).

The past 3 days were spent having long breakfasts staring at all the greenery around me (the photo above is the view of the pretty property across the street), cleaning house and doing a bit of gardening, getting a hair cut, eating in restaurants I have not been able to visit in months. Unlike most Baguio folk, I do eat out more often from June to September instead of going on “zero-spending” because that’s when I have the time to lounge and enjoy long lunches and dinners. I also know how it feels not to have any business during the lean months, so it’s important for me to help my favorite restaurants survive. What happens is, when Atenara is uber busy, I end up eating odd hours, at nearby restaurants or ordering take-out food. But I believe residents should make the economy flow during lean months instead of hoarding cash. I also plan to do all my features of “Culinary Adventure Baguio” in the next few months.

Now I actually look forward to the lean months because this is MY vacation time. I can complete unfinished websites, start new ones, do a bit of traveling, stay up late for poker, play with all the doggies, spend time with my family in Manila, restore vintage cars, be less of a lazy blogger. Lazy blogging for me means no photos in a feature article, or not changing wordpress themes.

The past two days, I was able to go around and take photos that should have accompanied:

• Does Baguio Really Need that BGH Flyover?
• The Korean Impact on Baguio
• Questions, Questions

You may want to check those articles out again in a day or two to see pictures. I figured, instead of making Part Two articles, I would just edit the posts and insert the photos.

Since I am in the hospitality business, Baguio’s high tourist months are when I work the hardest, with hardly any time off, and with odd hours (because guests arrive and depart at all times of the day and inquiries come in even at 3 am). On top of attending to all my guests’ needs and concerns, I do have to work on future bookings simultaneously. Of course during the lean months all my earnings for the high season go to paying fixed costs like rent, salaries, utilities, even when there’s hardly anyone checked in. But we do get lucky with off-season seminars here and there and those allow us to stay in the black.

In 2006, almost all typhoons that hit the Philippines avoided Baguio — but of course tourists had no way of anticipating that so very few visited last July, August and September. During the fantabulous Milenyo that took Manila literally by storm, we enjoyed fair weather here and many folks came up that weekend to get out of the dark that that destructive typhoon caused. I got calls saying, “Kumusta kayo diyan (How are you doing there?)” to which I would reply, “the weather here is great, and you know Baguio, even during power outages, we still have natural airconditioning!”

Oh well, I’m just rambling here today. Probably because I’m relaxing some now, probably because I was able to go out and take photos of everything and nothing really, probably because I am at leisure and am indulging in a bit of purposelessness, believing full well that I deserve it.