It has been 23 days since Typhoon Ondoy (Ketsana is its international name, I think) ravaged my hometown of Marikina City here in Metro Manila, so it took me a while to restore things back to normal in my modest abode. Not that it was flooded per se like most of the houses in the lower parts of the city (I live more than three floors up of a condo) but the barangay where I live was indeed submerged in more than 5-feet high of floodwater. Electricity and water supply and of course phone lines were all cut off and were restored slowly, one by one. But as of this writing, Globelines has yet to restore our landlines and broadband connection. In the meantime, I use this mobile internet usb things to connect.
And as I type this, it should be dinnertime, but my girlfriend is still out with her friends on a study session thing. As I wait for her, I munch on things we bought earlier at Parco, a big grocery a few barangays away (no working grocery is open as yet in our vicinity). And I am just happy because our pantry is well-stocked again. Imagine being caught in a typhoon, trapped in your own home, without cooking things to help you and food supplies to nourish you. That was what happened to us 23 days ago.
Most of my Ondoy narratives are posted in my original blog because I used it to update my relatives and friends abroad of our situation. But the food-related segue I want to narrate here in full.
Like I said, happiness is a well-stocked pantry, because if you know me, grocery-shopping has been a ritual in my family since I was small. As a family, we never liked going to church but we went to groceries religiously. Whenever we hear of a new grocery that opened somewhere (even as far away as Subic!), we check it out and see what goodies they have and if prices are cheaper there. Yes, my loving family is a grocery junkie one hehe. And we love it!
My father has this tendency to overbuy supplies. If he finds his favorite V8 vegetable juice drink in cans, he buys like a whole box of it instead of buying a few or a dozen. Isang box, galing Japan, teh! Pramis. His philosophy of overbuying is that we will never know what will happen tomorrow or it might take us a while to go back to the grocery again, so better stock up. He has a point there, although my mom just doesn’t like it when he overbuys stuff that she thinks is unnecessary. Whatever those things are, I really don’t know. Well, let them be; they’re parents, and they’re a couple, so they’re allowed to be idiosyncratic with each other that way.
When I had high-paying jobs in the past, I also brought that overbuying stocks habit with me when I moved out and lived on my own (or lived in with girlfriends). But now that I mostly function as a public school teacher and prices of commodities are just so high (damn this government!), I rarely overbuy stuff. Maybe I am also wiser as I grew older, and I have already determined how to be a smart consumer. But the Taurus in me sometimes wants to indulge, and hence I still have impulse buying behavior a bit.
But having supplies is indeed a necessity in this country. Not only is my father right in saying that he doesn’t want to run out of supplies of something he wants to particularly eat or drink, but I want to add to that that we will never really know what will happen tomorrow. Like Ondoy. Had I known that it would be a super-duper disaster storm, I would have gone to the grocery days before and stocked up. Sadly, when Ondoy did come, the streets were already flooded. My girlfriend was in the middle of frying spam when our supply of gasul ran out the day Ondoy came. And the delivery people backed out because they said the streets were already flooded a bit by the time I called. So we were left with some un-fried spam which my girlfriend tried to cook in our small oven-toaster. By nighttime, we were afraid that the lights would be cut anytime soon, and I was ranting about how we could have cooked the four remaining packs of instant noodles if we still had gasul. Good thing my girlfriend said she could cook it using the rice cooker, so she did just that. That was the last time we had hot food in our home during the typhoons. I opened up our pantry to check what else we could cook and store for later, food which will not go stale or rot outside the ref. Sadly, even bread we ran out of. But we still had microwavable popcorn, and so I popped a bag. Hey, popcorn is still food!
The day after Ondoy, we didn’t have much left in our pantry and ref, so we decided to go down and check out the streets and the market which was just near our place. The floodwater has subsided already but there was mud all over, mud and puddles. If only mudpies could be eaten for real, no one would go hungry. Unfortunately, there were no stores or establishments open because all of them were damaged by the floods. It was rather disheartening to see my neighborhood food suppliers in disarray — our silog favorite Tapa King (which just reopened yesterday, yay!), my writing space Starbucks, our favorite fast foods Jollibee and McDo, even my cheese bread supplier Pan de Manila. Even the neighborhood Ministop was equally devastated.
However, at the market, the stall that sold goto (a kind of rice porridge meal with strips of pork insides) or the gotohan was miraculously open, and I was happy because we could have a bowl of satisfying hot goto for less than 20 pesos. But sadly, they weren’t selling goto, only those big orange balls which the name eludes me now (tokneneng is the smaller version, which are quail eggs; I often forget this!), balls which are whole hard-boiled eggs dipped in an orange-colored batter and then deep-fried in super-hot oil, eaten with spicy or non-spicy vinegar. Hey, it was still hot food, so we bought two balls each and asked for extra vinegar, as I am a vinegar junkie. We still had leftover pancit canton from the night before and ate that as well. But my girlfriend wanted to eat real food na raw come Monday, so we packed our things and went to my parents’ house in a slightly higher part of Marikina where they only had like 4 inches of flood inside the house, and the electricity in their village was immediately installed back. That was our life for like 3 or 4 days, with some nights spent sleeping there at my parents’ because it was more comfortable there.
After Ondoy, another typhoon entered the country in less than a week, Pepeng. While we wanted to prepare for it, much of our life here was still in recovery mode, which means even the grocery stores are still closed (they still are, in my area, up to the Riverbanks Mall area). And even if I wanted to go to the grocery outside Marikina, it was hell getting out of the city, because the Marikina Bridge that passed the river was closed, and the only way in and out of the city is via Marcos Hi-way, a longer detour, which was always traffic those days because other jeeps were also rerouted out there, together with the regular jeeps that plied it daily, like the Angono, Cogeo, Antipolo and Cainta lines. We ended up eating in karinderyas that were already open in areas that were not badly hit, which were in inner Marikina. Sometimes we would also go back to my parents’ house to eat meals since the market where my mom shops was already opened, and she could already cook meals regularly.
So never again! I don’t want to be caught here at home without some bread, rice and canned goods. My pantry is now overflowing again, thanks mainly to a deluge of writers’ fees I collected in bulk only earlier. My girlfriend and I bought the basics, and we stocked up on our favorite snacks, too, or chi-cha as I like to call it, hers being her favorite cookies, jellies, candies and chips. Same here, plus I stocked up on some extras we could enjoy later, like canned soup, oatmeal and stuff. I’ll post photos of some of the more interesting of them in later posts, when my internet connection is back to normal and uploading photos would be easier. For now, words are fine.
So please don’t panic-buy, just buy supplies, okay? Works for us.
can you say ho-mo-e-rot-ic?
5-cheese pala, and garlic. win.
ayan silang mga keso.
the cast of characters: L-R orfinada family relatives (cousin and tita, mom’s sister), my papa and mommy, me and my girlfriend goldstar. no, she doesn’t drink; props lang ‘yang beer kas akin ‘yan.
i think i was the one who chose this. crispy crablets with vinegar dip. the big red chili peppers could just be garnishing but since i didn’t like spicy food, i left it alone. well, this was okay. crunchy, pampulutan, goes fine with any kind of beer (mainly san mig, theirs was pale, mine was light). puwede na. not bad, but not superb either. on to the next.
huwag mapilit!
