If I could describe the UP Staff Chorale 2001 concert tour as a shape or a figure, I would say it was a circle. All those strange little parallels that marked the beginning and end of the journey. The path we took, traveling from one end of the US as well as a small part of Canada and back, finally returning to the place where we began. The same bustling airport in the city where we first set foot on American soil, the same sun-drenched skyline and concrete metropolis outside the window, the same group of people as when we first arrived in this strange, new country. 

Well, maybe not quite the same people as when we began. Not even the same number of suitcases, in fact. Because you see, a circle can quite easily be a spiral, if you look at it with different eyes. 

Departure, November 1

It was past 12:00 in the morning when the circle began. It felt unreal, waiting there in the dimly lit hall of the UP School of Economics with suitcases the size of small refrigerators stacked around us, waiting for the bus that would take us to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. You’d think all the long months and excruciating weeks spent preparing for the US-Canada tour would have drilled the fact in by now, but it still felt vaguely weird to be standing there dressed in identical UP Staff Chorale T-shirts, armed to the teeth with jackets and passports and lists of things to do and stuff to bring, saying goodbye to loved ones who kept reminding one of the many wondrous items one can bring home for said loved ones from the US. Maybe it was appropriate that we left home in the deep of the night. It all felt like a dream.

It was also undeniably exciting. For some of us, it was our second or third international concert tour (or the fourth or fifth, but for whom I’m not telling) but for many of us, it was our first time. First time to ride an airplane, first time to catch of glimpse of Hong Kong, first time to go to the US—our first time everything, we whispered to one another with eyebrows waggling meaningfully.

It was 4:00 in the morning when we arrived at NAIA. Having had very little sleep, if at all, we drifted zombie-like about the airport waiting to be checked in, frantically weighing carryall luggage and making some last minute re-packing. The boarding area was gradually filling with people by the time we got there. We slumped into the chairs and dozed off, while a few of us who weren’t completely overcome by sleepiness spent the time with our faces pressed against the window, watching the last Filipino sunrise we would see in a month.

For the most part, I discovered I liked traveling by airplane. You could get used to having flight attendants offering you your choice of food and drink and having your own personal TV set and radio right beneath your fingertips, although the programs left much to be desired. And the view could do with a bit of help; a never-ending field of white clouds could get a bit dull after some time. 

The Hong Kong airport was, in a word, impressive. How they managed to find enough gray  carpeting to cover a floor area half the size of the island the airport was sitting on is nothing short of miraculous. The bathrooms were done in black tile, very clean and with high-tech faucets and an unending supply of paper towels. (As the trip progressed, I became a bit of a connoisseur of public bathrooms. It seemed the first thing we ever did every time we entered a building was go to the bathroom.) Of course, every bathroom we saw after that had paper towels. And sentient faucets. And toilets that could pass the SATs. And toilet paper! Actual rolls of toilet paper in the cubicles! And metal trashcans attached to the walls! Oh, the wonders! 

Of course, we were all rather groggy by that time, and no amount of  tooth brushing could completely remove the moss that was growing on our teeth. We had to wait for hours for our transfer flight, and in the meantime we wandered around the shops and played with the conveyor belts (actual conveyor belts! the lazy man’s sidewalk!) and sat on the floor playing games and singing drunken renditions of our repertoire, to the exasperation of our fellow passengers.

The United Air airplane was big. Bigger than the Cathay Pacific one. But after a few hours of squirming around trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in, I found that no matter how cozy an airline seat looked, you still ended up feeling as if you’d been the one crammed into the overhead baggage compartment and not your baggage. And although it could well be that tiredness and lack of sleep had throttled the life out of my sense of time, it seemed all we ever did on that trip to San Francisco was eat. Eat and sleep. That is to say, succumb to unconsciousness when exhaustion overcame the discomfort of having our knees pointing in opposite directions and our necks bent in half. The food on United Air, to their credit, was good. Of course, to you who have known airline food for longer than we have, the food could have been as spectacular as baked cardboard, but for us, it was not too darn bad at all.

We arrived at the San Francisco airport ashen-faced with fatigue and looking as if our clothes had been spun-dried with us still wearing them. We wanted nothing more than to drop into the nearest bed or reasonably flat surface and sleep until next week.But of course we were in San Francisco now. We were in America.The land we’ve only imagined until now, relying on photographs of balikbayan relatives and the tales spun by Hollywood. The excitement we felt was more effective than a cup of the nastiest espresso. It also helped that we were all terrified of the stringent airport security rules, which required that we submit even our shoes to the intense scrutiny of stone-faced men in uniform.

Finding so many Filipinos working in the SF airport was both delightful and disorienting. Here you are, standing on American territory and hearing all these white and black people speak in American-accented English, just like in the movies, and then the passport inspector suddenly says, “Uy, saan kayo sa atin?” Weirdly funny, but you get used to it.By the time we arrived in San Diego, we barely looked human and trust me, we felt worse. It was a wonder our hosts recognized us at all. We stumbled out of the airport, blinked up at the black birds and seagulls performing aerial ballets, breathed in the crisp air, listened as our hosts gave last minute instructions, and glanced at one another with weak congratulations in our eyes: Well, here we are

San Diego, California, November 1 to 8

San Diego, California, has been called the finest city, our hosts informed us, and one of the reasons for this is its perfect weather. Our first taste of daylight in San Diego—warm splashes of sunlight mingling in the refreshing coolness—induced us strip off our jackets and say arrogantly, “Hey, this is just like Baguio. It’s not that cold.” 

Of course, by the time evening fell we were shivering in our shirts, arrogance being useless in keeping out the chill. No wonder people went around in sweaters. And it only grew progressively colder as we went from one city to another.  Our hosts in San Diego, led by the UP Alumni Association of San Diego and its president, 
Dr. Aurora Cudal, were one of the other reasons why San Diego is known as the finest city. They welcomed us warmly and brought us to our host families with brisk efficiency. Our group was split into two: the Northerners (those whose host families lived in the northern area of San Diego) and the Southerners (figure it out), to add a little touch of the Civil War Era in our American experience. Of course, if I were to say which group got to stay in the best part of San Diego, I’d be putting my life into my hands. 

Balboa Park, San Diego Zoo, the Gaslight District, Silver Strand Beach, the border crossing into Mexico, the Colorado Hotel, Sea World, swap meets  and fruit orchards—these are only some of the famous landmarks, tourist spots and interesting places that we got to visit in San Diego. We became the quintessential tourists, madly clicking away at our cameras and ooh-ing and aah-ing at every corner. To be honest, just walking down the sidewalk was a treat. Rolling hills the color of apple cider, flowers blooming in every corner, evergreens side by side with trees glowing gold in the sunlight—practically every place was a tourist spot. 

We had two official performances in San Diego, the first at the First United Methodist Church and the second at the Miramar College auditorium. Maybe it was our host families’ generosity rubbing off on us, or maybe it was the poignant sight of Filipinos in a foreign land who treasured all the things that reminded them of home, or maybe it was our own emotions stripped raw by the journey—maybe it was all that, but when we sang for the Filipino-Americans those two nights, it felt as if our hearts were flinging themselves out of our mouths along with our voices. Songs we had been practicing for months suddenly became more than just a bunch of words and melodies. They were the dreams and longings and hopes of a people whose blood we shared. People said afterwards that our songs moved them to tears. Maybe it was the other way around. The audience moved us to tears, and this to our dismay as we discovered how hard it was to sing when you had to battle an overwhelming urge to start bawling instead. 

In between performances, we spent time with our host families and ate. Often at the same time. Or just plain often. To our delight, we found that grapes in the US were as common as butong-pakwan and cornik back home, and we ate enough to supply a small county with enough wine for a year. We also discovered a sweetly tart, roundish fruit the color of a bright sunset that some of us mistakenly called “tomatoes”, to our hosts’ amusement. We were lucky, they said, that we made it in time for persimmon season. We were lucky, we thought much later, that some of us managed to smuggle some of this delicious fruit through the airport security back home. 

We spent eight days in San Diego, our longest stay in our tour. We sang for a church service, we sang for the customers of a Filipino grocery store and for guests at a special reception for Asian-Americans, and we even sang for the Mayor of San Diego, which felt as real as dinner with the US President. One rather unusual experience we had happened a night or two before we left. The hosts and their guests gathered around in Dr. Juanita Nacu’s living room and talked. That’s right, simply talked. About what they experienced and what they felt during our stay. I will remember San Diego for a good many things, but one thing that will always stand out will be that evening of simply talking with people who’d given us so much. 

We left San Diego early in the morning. Weeks before, we were warned of the many difficulties we might experience on our trip, but they never told us how hard it would be to say goodbye. Puffy-eyed and sniffling, we huddled together in the boarding area and teased one another about the nasty “cold” we’d caught en route to the airport. But that’s okay. Hard as it was to say goodbye, there was the rest of the tour to look forward to. And Denver was waiting for us. 

Denver, Colorado, November 8 to 13

The trip to Denver passed by in a daze. With all places we went to in San Diego, it seemed the one thing we didn’t get to see much of was our bed. Sleep had become a fleeting thing, a dark, dreamless affair that ended too soon, and there was no hope of getting enough of it on an airplane, although believe me, we tried. But soon the bits of landscape we could see through the clouds turned white and bluish-black: snow-capped mountains bordering coppery fields that went on forever. Whoever had given the state of Colorado its name certainly wasn’t kidding about it.

The Denver airport is less an airport as it is a small city. It even has its own damned railway system. If I seem disgruntled at this behemoth of an airport, it’s because I was one of the pair who had to endure an hour or so of icy terror when we walked out of the bathroom and found ourselves completely alone. We stood there breathing carefully through our noses, trying to catch a glimpse of our companions or even a vaguely Asiatic face in a sea of white people in cowboy boots and Stetsons. The Denver airport had never seemed so huge until that moment, and the movie Home Alone 2 so realistic. If I live to see another concert tour, I never want to go through that again.

We were eventually found and reunited with our luggage. Shaken and sleep-deprived and feeling muzzy-headed in the thin air, we arrived at the FACC center and were welcomed by the organization, led by Mrs. Nora Mercado, while we waited for our host families to pick us up. The sight of the strange, white stuff covering the ground in patches perked us up though, and we darted off to the nearest white patch and sank our hands into the cold, dust-like ice crystals, our first experience of snow.Denver, the city with the famous Mile High Stadium, is approximately a mile above sea level. With its snow-covered mountains and streets lined with red and gold trees and houses that looked as if they’d popped right out of a postcard, Denver was our first sight of America as we envisioned it to be. There are significantly less Filipinos in Denver than there are in San Diego. Many of the Filipinos living in Denver are married to non-Filipinos, and it was fascinating to observe the workings of a mixed marriage, the way one could appreciate, enjoy and even love the vastly different culture of his or her spouse. 

Our first sight of the King’s Center auditorium, where we were to perform two days later, came hours after our arrival during our first rehearsal. That auditorium, with its perfect acoustics and gentle lighting and violet and cream walls, was truly worthy of a king, pun intended. It was sheer intimidation. You could whisper on stage, or in our case, sing off-key, and be heard all the way in the back row. Which was unfortunate, as that particular rehearsal was clearly not one of our more stunning performances. Groggy and dazed, we stumbled through our songs and choreography and must have seemed, to our hosts and organizers watching in horror, like a bunch of strangers who’d been thrown out of a bar and dragged onto the stage. Our conductor, Francis, must have known a moment of existential dread. The pressure was even more intense as we’d heard whisperings that were not in the least flattering or supportive. We had to give a good performance, if only to wipe away the aftertaste of that lousy rehearsal.

So we gave them a kick-ass performance. That beautiful, brutal auditorium became our friend as we sang our hearts out, even accidentally knocking aside the glasses where our prop candles were set, sending them tinkling across the stage. We ended up in tears again as we performed, and each tear had a prayer: Please, please let them like us. Evidently, it worked. Nothing beats the power of prayer. 

Denver was beautiful. Twinkling lights and azure skies, mountains heaving up from the red-gold earth with flanks covered with snow and furred with pine trees, red-gold leaves littering the ground and red-gold boulders looming over you like a guilty conscience. Denver was Loveland Pass—where you could stand on a rocky ledge and talk to God—the Garden of the Gods, Redrock, Aspen. It was also, on the flipside, Nieman Marcus, Lords & Taylor, and The Tattered Cover Bookstore, otherwise known as the doorway to heaven for book lovers. 

Our hosts in Denver were as warm as the mountains were cold, and the FACC center became a second home while we were there. If our entire stay in Denver was a success, it was only because of the unceasing efforts of Mrs. Nora Mercado and Mrs. Donna Lavigne and many others. Of course, one of the things about the FACC that will forever be etched in my memory is the fabulous food. Spaghetti and bread and turkey and ham and salad and all the grapes we could stuff ourselves with. And all that wine! Ah, the bacchanalian pleasures we have known. 

The FACC was also the place where we bid our hosts goodbye. Once again, tears and runny noses abounded. We arrived at the airport, which had grown no less monstrous in the past six days, and as we waited to board, we sang a hearty rendition of God Bless America in lieu of checking if everybody in the choir was present. As the airplane took off, we settled ourselves as best we could for a long flight, as this time we were headed off to the other end of the US, in New Jersey. And nothing, not even an airplane crashing shortly after takeoff, was going to stop us from visiting New York City. 

Jersey City, New Jersey, November 13 to 17

It was evening when we arrived, and there, waiting to greet us at the gate, were our hosts. Again, exhaustion had rendered us semi-conscious, but this did not diminish the joy of family reunions and meeting up with old friends. We were distributed among our host families and hustled off home, and our first glimpse of Jersey City, New Jersey, was a glittering array of city lights framed by the metal beams of the darkened bridges. 

And the first thing we did, upon reaching our new homes, was whip out our trusty phone cards and call up everybody we knew in Los Angeles. A crisis had sprung up, one that threw a serious monkey wrench in our plans. Our contact in LA, which should have been the second to the last city in our tour, had backed out, leaving us with no performance and no place to stay in LA. Visions of us singing on a sidewalk and sleeping on benches in a public park danced in our minds. But as it would cost too much to have our plane tickets rebooked, we decided to grit our teeth and tough it out, and everybody who knew anybody in that city was to call them up and beg for shelter for as many of the group as can be arranged. Nothing like a good dose of drama to heighten the experience, eh? 

Most people we’d talked to about our going to New Jersey had only one thing to say about it: “Huh?” The reason for their confusion, they explained, was that when the list of most picturesque US states was being written out, New Jersey had had to sleep off a hangover and couldn’t make it. New Jersey was industrialized, as someone said in the tone you would use to say Bill Gates was a good businessman. But then, they would add brightly, there was always New York.

I don’t know about you, but Jersey City felt awfully familiar. Sprawling shopping centers and discount stores, houses and apartments shouldering one another like subway commuters, walls covered with graffiti (or rather, graffiti with a bit of wall in the background), fenced-in basketball courts, people yelling at one another across the street, children playing in the sidewalks, buses and plastic bags and old newspapers scattered everywhere—strike a chord, don’t it? What’s more, everywhere you went and I mean everywhere, there were Filipinos who would smile at you and say, “Saan kayo sa atin? Matagal na kayo dito?” 

All I know is, my homesickness began in earnest after New Jersey. Jersey isn’t pretty, the way Denver and San Diego are pretty. Jersey is a tough old coot of a city, rolling its eyes up at its glittering neighbors and spitting at their feet. It’s not postcard material, but the neighbors knew one another and you could be your own person there and moreover—and this is important—you could actually walk to the nearest grocery store. Also, it helped that it was right beside New York City.The Couples for Christ, with the help of Dr. Dennis Dimaculangan, organized our performance. It was amazing how they managed to pull it together so well in such short notice. 

There was a bit of a mix-up when we got to the school beside the Church of St. Paul, where our performance was to be held. We slipped into the auditorium and sat around in the dark (we couldn’t find the light switch) until somebody informed us that we were performing in the cafeteria instead. It was the first time we actually had a stage of our own making, as we pushed tables aside and arranged chairs in rows. We turned a pre-schoolers’ classroom into a dressing room, and had a hoot of a time playing with the colorful plastic seesaws, with our gold skirts hiked up around our knees. The ceiling of our makeshift stage was low, which helped throw our voices all the way to the back of the room. It was a bit too low, though, for the flagpole that we used as a prop in one of our songs. The flag bearer ended up knocking a microphone to the floor and nearly poking a hole right through the ceiling.Our stay in Jersey City was the shortest in our tour, so we were determined to get as much done as we could. Some of us went straight to New York City right after our performance. Some of us had host families who actually lived there. And some of us had to wait the next day to get there. 

Our stay in New Jersey seemed to be full of lights. The colorful lights from the casinos and slot machines in Atlantic City, the flashes of neon on the streets of New York, the twinkling of Christmas lights in the windows of big-time stores like Macy’s and Lord & Taylor. There was Times Square, Rockefeller Center, the American Historical Library & Museum, the Empire State Building, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island. Two of us even got to watch a Broadway musical. Only one of us, however, got to go near the remains of the World Trade Center—and wept anew at the immeasurable tragedy and loss.It seemed we were ever destined to say goodbye in the wee hours of the morning. We’d barely rubbed the sleep out of our eyes when we found ourselves shivering in the cold beside the bus that would take us to a whole new country altogether. Bundled up in thick coats and carrying enough baon to feed half of Toronto, we stuffed ourselves in the bus and waited eagerly for our first sight of Niagara Falls. And to think we didn’t even know how to sing Canada’s national anthem at the time. 

Toronto, Canada, November 17 to 23

We’d been warned—repeatedly and emphatically—that Toronto, Canada, was going to be cold. That the snow in Denver would be a mere dusting compared to the snow in Toronto. So we came prepared. All our coats and sweaters and gloves and scarves were primed and ready. Hat hair had practically become a permanent condition, but nevertheless we were prepared for any snowstorm that would cross our way. So naturally it was sunny when we got to Toronto. Of course, it was cold. You’d never mistake Toronto for Hawaii—it was a far cry from San Diego, even. It was the kind of cold that reduced you to a reedy-voiced, shivering pile of cloth, and you could practically count the air molecules that exited your mouth every time you breathed. But the lemon-bright afternoon fading into an overcast twilight—with not a single snowflake to break the solemn gray of the sky—was hardly the Winter Wonderland we were expecting. The surprise was further added when people remarked on the weather, which was unusual for Toronto at this time of the year. 

Our first sight of Canada was not of the Niagara Falls as we’d have liked. It was downtown Toronto and First United Methodist Church basement where we stayed for a while, looking like refugees driven in by the cold. Joyful reunions with family and friends punctuated the scene, while the rest of us feverishly thumbed through hymnbooks in search of Canada’s national anthem. Some of us already had host families waiting, but most of us had to spend the night at our conductor’s uncle’s house, scattered about the guestroom and basement like fallen trees. 

We held our concert at the church auditorium, and while it was nowhere near as grand as the one in Denver, it was still a real auditorium, with a real stage and real dressing rooms and real stage lights and all. Being on a stage again was inspiring, although, of course, what was a performance without its little moments of strangeness? We’d discovered by then how inconvenient it was to be setting up our own props (remember the glasses with the candles inside?) in our barely-zipped up costumes, and one of us ended up accidentally kicking the glasses across the stage, creating a not-unimpressive medley of clinking glass and startled gasps from the audience. (I managed to do worse damage to an innocent pitcher of water sitting on the step, but at least it happened backstage.) And our pianist, Christine, was less than happy with the piano, which turned out to have no damper pedal to speak of, turning even her grandest chords into staccato finger exercises. It sounded as if we were singing along with music from one of Charlie Chaplin’s films. Hard as it was to keep from crying onstage, sometimes it was even harder to keep from laughing. 

We were all shuffled off to our respective host families, and our experience of Toronto began in earnest shortly thereafter. Some of us—probably the same ones who just had to go see New York City right after the performance, never mind that it was so dark you couldn’t tell which buildings were which—all trooped together to see Niagara Falls. Some of us spent long evenings chatting with old friends and relatives and catching up with one another’s lives. And some of us—nay, three of us from among the six who had the great good luck to find themselves staying in an apartment in the heart of downtown Toronto, spent the night walking along Yonge and Jarvis Streets, gazing at the light-studded buildings towering over the city and the almost fantastical vision of the CN Tower disappearing into a sea of faintly tinted cloud. Shopping centers and subway stations and historic buildings became second nature to us in the course of our stay. 

One of the hosts told us that many movie outfits choose to shoot their films in downtown Toronto, which they transform into New York City on celluloid simply by changing the names of the streets. In a way, Toronto does resemble that great city, although much cleaner, of course. There were streetcars and buses and taxis chugging along beside parks and gardens—and squirrels! Cute little mice with bottle-brush tails and cheeky expressions. Toronto was Eaton, The Bay, St. James Church, St. Michael Church, The World’s Biggest Bookstore, the weather tower, coffee shops at every nook and cranny, the two City Halls, University Avenue—we even found this naughty little shop called The Condom Shack, but we couldn’t afford anything more than a quick peek and a blush as we browsed through the, er, interesting items. 

Toronto the city finds stiff competition in Toronto the countryside, however. There was, of course, Niagara Falls. (It’s true. The Canadian side of the falls is so much more impressive than the American side.) The crashing, cascading waters of Niagara were a good contrast to the serenity of Lake Ontario as seen from Scarborough Bluff, a beautiful little park nestled at its shore. The breeze blowing gently from the lake was absolutely freezing, though, and we knew it was time to leave when our fingers had practically frozen into permanent claws poised over our cameras. 

We gathered together again at the same church where we first arrived to wait for our bus ride back to Jersey City. (We’d found out during the long ride to Toronto that our bus driver’s name was George, so some wit in the group gave him the nickname “George Bus.”) George and his companion nearly threw their backs out at the weight of our suitcases—there was good shopping in Toronto—and we raised our steaming cups of coffee against the midnight sky in a farewell toast to Toronto, the city of a thousand opportunities. Then we settled down to watch a truly cheezy kung fu flick in anticipation of LA, the city of a thousand stars, most of which are of the landlocked variety. 

Los Angeles, California, November 23 to 28

Due to the aforementioned crisis concerning our LA performance, our expectations of our stay in Los Angeles were somewhere between the tarmac and the ground-level parking area. We arrived there woozy from the long flight from Newark and depleted in number, as two of us returned to New Jersey and two more went home ahead of us. We didn’t know where each one of us was going to stay, and the thought that we wouldn’t be seeing one another again until we boarded that bus to San Francisco filled us with a vague sense of dread. 

Fortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Sotero, Ms. Lutz Dizon, Mr. Mark Castro and Mr. Art Pacho and many others quickly came to our rescue, giving us not one but three venues for our performance. Family and friends also came through, offering us a place to stay and good company in this strange, new city. To them we offer our sincerest gratitude. I guess that’s one reason why they call it the City of Angels. 

The other reason is that angels are the only ones who can afford to travel the length and breadth of LA without a set of wheels. Los Angeles is huge. The nation’s largest county could pass as an entire region in the Philippines. And although the highways aren’t as disorienting as the ones in San Diego, which all tended to look alike, there are so many more of them. The thought of getting lost in LA is just plain scary. 

We performed twice in two churches, once during a UPAA reception and once at a hotel—not much of a performance, that one, we just sang a couple of songs during the annual bash of the St. Columban group as a breather before the ballroom-dancing marathon recommenced. Stress levels ran high during that time, a result of all the accumulated pressures of all the previous stops, and tempers rose accordingly, resulting in a few incidents worthy of Hollywood. One time we even had to face the prospect of performing without a pianist, without a narrator, without our props and, at least for a few nerve-wracking moments, without a conductor. I’m telling you, no ride in Disneyworld could hold a candle to all the highs and lows we went through that day. 

But then, who could ever stay down for long in LA, the land of Universal Studios, Disneyworld, Beverly Hills, Venice Beach, Highland Hollywood mall and In & Out Burgers, which ought to be considered a national treasure in its own right? There was Rodeo Drive, and some of us got to get their faces plastered alongside Harrison Ford’s signature on the sidewalk. We spent an entire day in Disneyworld, and in the company of Winnie the Pooh, Snow White, Ariel and Mickey Mouse, we who have been considered adults for many years of our lives now reverted to childhood again, which, when you think about it, wasn’t really that far a drop from our usual behavior.

We even had our own little adventure that same evening. With a 7:30 p.m. dinner date in LA City to attend, a group of us rashly decided to try and make it there from Disneyworld by bus. By 7:00 we clustered together for warmth at the bus stop with our change clutched in our  fists. By 7:30, the bus started to move. By 9:30, after an agonizing two-hour ride through what seemed like a hundred cities, we were cold and hungry and thoroughly lost. We got off at a gas station to call for help, and arrived at the dinner date just in time to help the good folks who invited us pack up the leftovers and return the couch to its original place in the living room. Like I said about getting lost in LA… 

The next day was Universal Studios Day, which took the amusement park experience to a new level of coolness. We got to prance around with Marilyn, swoon into Count Dracula’s arms, and wear wigs that could make Bozo the Clown froth with envy.  If Disneyworld is for the child in you, then Universal is for that eager little blond in you who always wanted to be a star and hobnob with celebrities but just didn’t have the talent to pull it off. Some of us even got to go to Las Vegas, the city that never sleeps because all the noise caused by money streaming through the slot machines keeps it awake. Personally, I’d rather spend my money on something more substantial than a plastic bucket and “experience.” Okay, so I lost in the casino, but that’s not the point. (But oh, the lights… the music…the showgirls…) 

Strangely enough, one of the best things I will remember about LA is stepping out into the early morning sunshine and gazing at the sun-browned hills and snow-topped mountains in the distance, and up into the endlessly blue sky. That and all the moments spent with our host families and organizers who so gallantly came through for us made what should have been a complete fiasco into a memorable experience. It was still rather chaotic, but then our stay in San Francisco made up for that. 

San Francisco, California, November 28 to December 3

We took the Greyhound to San Francisco, and it took us through the planet Mars. 
No, I’m pretty sure we stayed on Earth, but after a few hours of nothing but fields and farmlands it all began to look like alien territory to us. We even passed by grazing areas filled with cows as far as the eye can see. (“Look, there’s a suitcase! And a wallet! And a sirloin steak!”) Soon the grazing areas began to rise into gently rolling hills, and finally, city lights began to twinkle in the distance. And then it began to rain. 

It was still raining when our bus swung into the station and we had to sort out our mountainous luggage into manageable heaps. It was still raining an hour later when we realized that we were not in the bus station where we were supposed to be, and our organizers were standing around in the rain waiting for us way across town. It was still raining when our much-aggrieved organizers finally found us, and after a brief explanation of the differences between the Oakland station and the San Francisco station, we hauled our piles of luggage through the rain and drove off to the reception hosted by FISH for PEACE members Dr. & Mrs. Isagani Samriento. And when we finally stumbled into our new homes and smiled drowsily at our hosts’ startled faces, it was the rain that lulled us to sleep. 

It was the impressive amount of water pouring down from the sky that led our organizers to cancel the official tour of San Francisco the next day. So it made somewhat perverse sense that the sun would be shining brightly the next day. Still, we got to see some of the sights that made San Francisco one of the most famous cities in the country. There was the Fisherman’s Wharf, with the pretty shops and the seals lying around barking their greetings at the tourists and Bubba Gump’s shrimp restaurant and of course, In and Out Burgers, California’s national treasure. (It was kind of funny seeing those little tiangge-like stalls lining the sidewalk. Nothing like a glimpse of Quiapo to remind you of home.) There was the Golden Gate Bridge that had, despite its name, red spires, red cables and red metal beams. There was the Palace of the Arts, with its Grecian pillars and ornate carvings, and Lombard, where the World’s Crookedest Street zigzagged its way down the hill. 

Of course, what is San Francisco without its cable cars? And those streets! Driving around the hills and valleys of San Francisco was like riding a roller-coaster, where you went up and up and up, paused for a moment at the top where you had time to consider the drop before you, then plummeted down, leaving your stomach behind. Besides the buses and cable cars, there was also the BART, San Francisco’s railway system, which thankfully doesn’t have as many dips and slides as the streets. 

San Francisco has to be the most well-organized performance we’ve ever had, thanks to the unstinting efforts of the Pamana ng Lahi Foundation, led by Mr. Cesar Torres, the United Bay Area, the Filipino American Center of the San Francisco Library, and the FISH for PEACE, among many others. Our host-families, generous to a fault, gave us a taste of what it’s like to be Filipinos in a city like San Francisco, where you can walk up to a clerk in Walmart and say, “Magkano po ito?” (Incidentally, if you’re wondering where you can get gen-oo-wine Pinoy products, look up Mr. Orly Magat’s store in Union City. Shameless plug, right there.) 

Our stay in San Francisco included more than San Francisco, thanks again to our organizers. A day spent touring the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Steinbeck Center in Salinas and speaking before a community college care-of the Cyber Barangay. The view of the sea was fantastic, with all those boulders, beaches, sea lions and sea gulls who after you’ve fed them half your sandwich swoop down and steal the other half right out of your hands, the ingrates. Speaking before Filipino Americans in the College’s Common Room was also quite an experience. Our only regret was that our time was too limited to allow us to ask all the questions we wanted, or to answer any more questions of theirs about us and the Philippines. 

Our performance was held at the Koret Auditorium of the San Francisco Library, the very same library where a famous scene in The City of Angels was shot. (“Quick! Take a picture of me pretending to be Meg Ryan!”) It’s a beautiful library, with its very own Filipiniana reading room. The auditorium, though not as intimidating as the one in Denver, was also lovely, although we couldn’t use our candles-in-glasses as the sprinkler system was too sensitive and the last thing we wanted was to give our audience an impromptu shower, so we had to use glow-sticks instead. It was somehow fitting that our very last performance in the US would be our fullest ever, complete with a video-projector showing famous Philippine tourist spots and scenes from Edsa 2, American flags for God Bless America, even a guitarist for one of our love songs. We went through everything—the songs, the dances, the costume-changing and prop-setting—with a sense of nostalgia as well as relief. It would be the last time we wore these costumes at least for a time (thank God, because after a month without dry-cleaning our costumes were starting to gain personalities of their own). The last time we would light our candles, although technically we didn’t, but you know what I mean. The last time we would gather together backstage and pray that we give everything we’ve got for our audience, the last time we would listen to Liza introducing our songs, and the last time we would gaze down at an audience with tears in our eyes. I’m not sure how many agree with me, but I think our last full show wasn’t too bad at all. 

Arrival, December 3

The same ungodly hour in the morning. The same last-minute packing routines. The same frantic rush to the same airport where we arrived to get our suitcases—more than what we brought with us from home—checked in. We waited in line for the security check and said tearful good-byes to our host-families and organizers, and as we did we all thought the same thing: When would we see one another again? 

Ghosts seemed to haunt us as we moved through the airport dragging our luggage behind us. Hey look, it’s the same café we saw when we first arrived. Didn’t we meet her when we went through security that first time? Do you remember when we sang God Bless America in the Denver airport? Do you remember when you two got lost? Yeah, well, it’s funny now, but it wasn’t back then. It all happened in just a month, and yet sometimes it felt like years. Strange how life doesn’t always fit into your perception of time and space. 

Do you remember when we first tasted persimmons? Don’t look now, but I’ve got a couple of ‘em in my luggage. Do you remember writing your name in the snow in Loveland Pass? Do you remember seeing that naked cowboy playing his guitar in the middle of the street in New York? Ah, what a fink, he wasn’t really naked, he still had his briefs on. Do you remember that crazy ride where we all got drenched and had to spend the rest of the day wringing water out of our shirts? Do you remember these people, our families and friends, both new and old? Do you remember?

The ghosts kept us awake for most of the trip back to Hong Kong, and dogged our feet as we plodded through the Hong Kong airport heading for our transfer flight. We sat around on the floor waiting to board while some of us attempted to call home on those alien devices innocuously called telephones, and listened to the drone of voices around us—not English or Chinese this time, but Filipino. The ghosts kept up all throughout our last plane ride and through the chaotic security check in NAIA. We went to the restroom, and the ghosts laughed at the sight of dingy tiles and busted faucets and toilets that can barely flush and absolutely no tissue to speak of. Sure, they laughed, and I guess we did too, but it was different for us.We were home. 

With heavier suitcases and thicker waistlines and memories that would last a lifetime, we were finally home. After a month of traveling through a place that was as different from our country as we could ever imagine, we were finally, finally home.And so the journey came full circle. Or a spiral, if you know how to look. 

About the writer

Despite an inability to commit herself to any organization, including her own religion, Celeste Castillo surprised herself by continuing to be a member of the UP Staff Chorale since she joined two years ago. She is a struggling writer, in the sense that she is struggling to actually write something, and a graduate student majoring in English. She is currently a staff member of the UP Office of Alumni Relations, and will sometimes answer the phone if you call the office at 929-8226.