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--- Begin Message ---BOBBY,
I'M SORRY, BUT OUR PLACE IS LOCKED DOWN WHEN WE'RE NOT THERE. IT'S OUR PREFERENCE NOT TO LET OTHER PEOPLE BUT OURSELVES USE OUR BEACH-HOUSE. THE TWO TIMES SO FAR THAT WE'VE USED IT THE LAST TWO YEARS, RELATIVES AND FRIENDS HAVE COME AND JOINED US. ACCORDINGLY, THE NEXT TIME WE'RE THERE SOMETIME IN DECEMBER, JANUARY, OR FEBRUARY, YOU ARE ALL WELCOME TO COME UP AND JOIN US. WE'LL PROBABLY BE THERE FOR 4 WEEKS TO 7 WEEKS, SO LET'S PLAN ON IT. I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND AND RESPECT OUR DESIRE AND PREFERENCE NOT TO HAVE PEOPLE USE OUR BEACH-HOUSE WHEN WE'RE NOT THERE.
MY REGARDS TO YOUR MOTHER, YOUR FAMILY, AND YOUR SIBLINGS AND THEIR FAMILIES.
EDMAR, LUKA, ADRIAN, AND JOAKIM
From: Roberto Guico <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Edward Guico III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: FR---EDMAR
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:52:20 -0700 (PDT)
kuya edmar,its ok,maybe next time,can we go there on april 5,6 and 7 with my family,mama and ate malou?
Edward Guico III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:(PDT)BOBBY,MY FAMILY AND I HAD JUST FINISHED OUR HOLIDAY AT OUR ILOCOS BEACH-HOUSE. WE WERE THERE THE WHOLE MONTH OF FEBRUARY AND THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH. I'M SORRY, BUT I DIDN'T KNOW YOU HAD TRIED TO CONTACT ME EARLIER. THE NEXT TIME WE ARE UP THERE, WHICH WILL PROBABLY BE IN DECEMBER '07, JANUARY '08, OR FEB. '08, I'LL LET YOU KNOW BEFOREHAND SO THAT WE CAN COORDINATE PLANS IN WHICH YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN COME UP AND JOIN US THERE.I WASN'T ACCESSIBLE BY E-MAIL FOR THE 2 MONTHS WE WERE ON VACATION, SO I NEVER SAW YOUR E-MAIL INQUIRY UNTIL WE CAME BACK TO TAIWAN 2 WEEKS AGO. AGAIN, I APOLOGIZE FOR NOT KNOWING ABOUT YOUR DESIRE TO VISIT WITH US. LET'S PLAN ON MAKING THAT HAPPEN THE NEXT TIME WE'RE UP THERE, OKAY?CHEERS.......EDMAR, LUKA, ADRIAN, AND JOAKIM
From: Roberto Guico <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Edward Guico III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: an honest write-up about filipinos
Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:56:59 -0700
hi!hows ur vacation in ilocos?can we go there with my family?who is my contact?
Edward Guico III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:Philippines.worsening
Interesting read for all Filipnos who think and those who who should really begin to think.about
>Subject: must read
>
>
>
> This is a very interesting, eloquent article
>written by an American, Barth Suretsky. His
>observations are interesting and his comments
>our culture and his respect and love of the
>Philippines are nicely written. Due to the
>situation in our country, let's hope this will make an
>impact on other Filipinos who read it.
>
>--------------------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
>--------------------- --------- --------- -------
>
> My decision to move to Manila was not a
>precipitous one. I used to work in New York as an
>outside agent for PAL, and have been coming to the
>Philippines since August, 1982. I was so impressed
>with the country, and with the interesting people I
>met, some of whom have become very close friends to
>this day, that I asked for and was granted a year's
>sabbatical from my teaching job in order to live in
>the
> I arrived here on August 21, 1983, several hours
>after Ninoy Aquino was shot, and remained here until
>June of 1984. During that year I visited many parts of
>the country, from as far north as Laoag to as far
>south as Zamboanga, and including Palawan. I became
>deeply immersed in the history and culture of the
>archipelago, and an avid collector of tribal
>antiquities from both northern Luzon and Mindanao.
>
> In subsequent years I visited the Philippines in
>1985, 1987, and 1991, before deciding to move here
>permanently in 1998. I love this country, but not
>uncritically, and that is the purpose of this article.
>
> First, however, I will say that I would not
>consider living anywhere else in Asia, no matter how
>attractive certain aspects of other neighboring
>countries may be. To begin with, and this is most
>important, with all its faults, the Philippines is
>still a democracy, more so than any other nation in
>Southeast Asia. Despite gross corruption, the legal
>system generally works, and if ever confronted with
>having to employ it, I would feel much more safe
>trusting the courts here than in any other place in
>the surrounding area. The press here is unquestionably
>the most unfettered and freewheeling
>in Asia, and I do not believe that is hyperbole in any
>way! And if any one thing can be used as a yardstick
>to measure the extent of the democratic process in any
>given country in the world, it is the extent to which
>the press is free.
>
> Nevertheless, the Philippines is a flawed
>democracy, and the flaws are deeply rooted in the
>Philippine psyche. I will elaborate. The basic
>problem seems to me, after many years of observation,
>to be a national inferiority complex, a disturbing
>lack of pride in being Filipino.
>
> Toward the end of April I spent eight days in
>Vietnam, visiting Hanoi, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City. I
>am certainly no expert on Vietnam, but what I saw
>could not be denied: I saw a country ravaged as no
>other country has been in this century by thirty years
>of continuous and incredibly barbaric warfare. When
>the Vietnam War ended in April, 1975, the country was
>totally devastated. Yet in the past twenty-five years
>the nation has healed and rebuilt itself almost
>miraculously! The countryside has been replanted and
>reforested. Hanoi and HCMC have been beautifully
>restored. The opera house in Hanoi is a splendid
>restoration of the original, modeled after the Opera
>in Paris, and the gorgeous Second Empire theater, on
>the main square of HCMC is as it was when built by the
>French a century ago. The streets are tree-lined,
>clean, and conducive for strolling. Cafes in the
>French style proliferate on the
>wide boulevards of HCMC. I am not praising the
>government of Vietnam, which still has a long way to
>travel on the road to democracy, but I do praise, and
>praise unstintingly, the pride of the Vietnamese
>people. It is due to this pride in being Vietnamese
>that has enabled its citizenry to undertake the
>miracle of restoration that I have described above.
>
> When I returned to Manila I became so depressed
>that I was actually physically ill for days
>thereafter. Why? Well, let's go back to a period when
>the Philippines resembled the Vietnam of 1975. It was
>1945, the end of World War II, and Manila, as well as
>many other cities, lay in ruins. (As a matter of fact,
>it may not be generally known, but Manila was the
>second most destroyed city in the entire war; only
>Warsaw was more demolished!)
>
> But to compare Manila in 1970, twenty-five years
>after the end of the war, with HCMC, twenty-five years
>after the end of its war, is a sad exercise indeed.
>Far from restoring the city to its former glory, by
>1970 Manila was well on its way to being the most
>tawdry city in Southeast Asia. And since that time the
>situation has deteriorated alarmingly. We have a city
>full of street people, beggars, and squatters. We have
>a city that floods sections whenever there is a
>rainstorm, and that loses electricity with every clap
>of thunder. We
>have a city full of potholes, and on these unrepaired
>roads we have a
>traffic situation second to none in the world for
>sheer nmanageability. We have rude drivers, taxis that
>routinely refuse to take passengers because of "many
>traffic!" The roads are also cursed with
>pollution-spewing buses in disreputable states of
>repair, and that ultimate anachronism, the jeepney! We
>have an educational system that allows children to
>attend schools without desks or books to accommodate
>them. Teachers, even college
>professors, are paid salaries so disgracefully low
>that it's a wonder that anyone would want to go into
>the teaching profession in the first place. We have a
>war in Mindanao that nobody seems to have a clue how
>to settle. The only policy to deal with the war seems
>to be to react to what happens daily, with no long
>range plan whatever. I could go on and on, but it is
>an endeavor so filled with futility that it hurts me
>to go on. It hurts me because, in spite of everything,
>I love the Philippines.
>
> Maybe it will sound simplistic, but to go back
>to what I said above, it is my unshakable belief that
>the fundamental thing wrong with this country is a
>lack of pride in being Filipino. A friend once
>remarked to me, laconically: "All Filipinos want to be
>something else. The poor ones want to be American, and
>the rich ones all want to be Spaniards. Nobody wants
>to be Filipino." That statement would appear to be a
>rather simplistic one, and perhaps it is. However, I
>know one Filipino who refuses to enter a theater until
>the national anthem has stopped being played because
>he doesn't want to honor his own country, and I know
>another one who thinks
>that history stopped dead in 1898 when the Spaniards
>departed! While it is certainly true that these
>represent extreme examples of national denial, the
>truth is not a pretty picture. Filipinos tend to
>worship, almost slavishly, everything foreign. If it
>comes from Italy or France it has to be better than
>anything made here. If the idea is American or German
>it has to be superior to anything that Filipinos can
>think up for themselves. Foreigners are looked up to
>and idolized. Foreigners can go anywhere without
>question. In my own personal experience, I remember
>attending recently an affair at a
>major museum here. I had forgotten to bring my
>invitation. But while
>Filipinos entering the museum were checked for
>invitations, I was simply waived through. This sort of
>thing happens so often here that it's just accepted
>routine. All of these things, the illogical respect
>given to foreigners simply because they are not
>Filipinos, the distrust and even disrespect shown to
>any homegrown merchandise, the neglect of anything
>Philippine, the rudeness of taxi drivers, the
>ill-manners shown by many Filipinos are all
>symptomatic of a lack of self-love, of respect for and
>love of the country in which they were born, and worst
>of all, a static mind-set in regard to finding ways to
>improve the situation.
>
> Most Filipinos, when confronted with evidence of
>governmental corruption, political chicanery, or gross
>exploitation on the part of the business community,
>simply shrug their shoulders, mutter "bahala na," and
>let it go at that. It is an oversimplification to say
>this, but it is not without a grain of truth to say
>that Filipinos feel
>downtrodden because they allow themselves to feel
>downtrodden. No pride. One of the most egregious
>examples of this lack of pride, this uncaring attitude
>to their own past or past culture, is the wretched
>state of surviving architectural landmarks in Manila
>and elsewhere. During the American period, many
>beautiful and imposing buildings were built, in what
>we now call the "art deco" style (although,
>incidentally, that was not a contemporary term; it was
>coined only in the 1960s). These were beautiful
>edifices, mostly erected during, or just before, the
>Commonwealth period. Three, which are still standing,
>are the Jai Alai Building, the Metropolitan Theater,
>and the Rizal Stadium. Fortunately, due to the truly
>noble efforts of my friend John Silva, the Jai Alai
>Building will now be saved. But unless something is
>done to the most beautiful and original of these three
>masterpieces of pre-war Philippine architecture, the
>Metropolitan Theater, it will disintegrate. The Rizal
>Stadium is in equally wretched shape. When the
>wreckers' ball destroyed Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial
>Hotel in Tokyo, and
>New York City's most magnificent building,
>Pennsylvania Station,
>both in 1963, Ada Louise Huxtable, then the
>architectural critic of The New York Times, wrote: "A
>disposable culture loses the right to call itself a
>civilization at all!" How right she was! (Fortunately,
>the destruction of Pennsylvania Station proved to be
>the sacrificial catalyst that resulted in the creation
>of New York's Landmark Commission. Would that such a
>commission be created for Manila...)
>
> Are there historical reasons for this lack of
>national pride? We can say that until the arrival of
>the Spaniards there was no sense of a unified
>archipelago constituted as one country. True. We can
>also say that the high cultures of other nations in
>the region seemed, unfortunately, to have bypassed the
>Philippines; there are no Angkors, no Ayuttayas, no
>Borobudurs. True. Centuries of contact with the high
>cultures" of the Khmers and the Chinese had, except
>for the proliferation of Song dynasty pottery found
>throughout the archipelago, no noticeable effect.
>True. But all that aside, what was here? To begin
>with, the ancient rice terraces, now threatened with
>disintegration, incidentally, was an incredible feat
>of engineering for so-called "primitive" people. As a
>matter of fact, when I first saw them in 1984, I was
>almost as awe-stricken as I was when I first
>laid eyes on the astonishing Inca city of Machu
>Picchu, high in the
>Peruvian Andes. The degree of artistry exhibited by
>the various tribes of the Cordillera of Luzon is
>testimony to a remarkable culture, second to none in
>the Southeast Asian region. As for Mindanao, at the
>other end of the archipelago, an equally high degree
>of artistry has been manifest for centuries in
>woodcarving, weaving and metalwork.
>
> However, the most shocking aspect of this lack
>of national pride, even identity, endemic in the
>average Filipino, is the appalling ignorance of the
>history of the archipelago since unified by Spain and
>named Filipinas. The remarkable stories concerning the
>Galleon de Manila, the courageous repulsion of Dutch
>and British invaders from the 16th through the 18th
>centuries, even the origins of the Independence
>movement of the late 19th century, are hardly known by
>the average Filipino in any meaningful way. And thanks
>to fifty years of American brainwashing, it is few and
>far between the number of Filipinos who really know -
>or even care - about the duplicity employed by the
>Americans and Spaniards to sell out
>and make meaningless the very independent state that
>Aguinaldo declared on June 12, 1898.
>
> A people without a sense of history is a people
>doomed to be
>unaware of their own identity. It is sad to say, but
>true, that the vast
>majority of Filipinos fall category. Without a sense
>of who you are how can you possibly take any pride in
>who you are?
>
> These are not oversimplifications. On the
>contrary, these are the root problems of the
>Philippine inferiority complex referred to above.
>Until the Filipino takes pride in being Filipino these
>ills of the soul will never be cured. If what I have
>written here can help, even in the smallest way, to
>make the Filipino aware of just who he is, who he was,
>and who he can be, I will be one happy expat indeed!
>
Francis Sycip_____
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--- End Message ---
