Things You Might Not Know About the Philippines

I don’t think I ever used Lonely Planet before Morocco, but now it is my go-to travel guide. It doesn’t have many pretty pictures, but it has a lot of practical information, with just enough background and history to make you want to visit a place.

I briefly outlined the history of the Philippines in an earlier entry, but here are some additional points; not that they weren’t in the other things I read beforehand, but now that I have been here a bit and taken in more, here you go.
- Magellan came here in 1521 and was killed here. In 1565 the Spanish came back and this time they stayed. The islands were administrated through Mexico.
- Great Britain invaded in 1762 and occupied Manila for two years (i.e. not long enough to make high tea a tradition!) – this planted the seeds of a Filipino nationalist movement that rose up again 100 years later.
- The Spanish-American War started because of a dispute over sugar and was centered in Cuba, but the Philippines were drawn into it. Dewey overcame the Spanish fleet in the battle of Manila Bay.
- The Treaty of Paris in 1898 ended the war, and the United States effectively bought the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam for $20 million.
- The themes of the home-front debate (hawks holding on for strategic and “humanitarian” reasons while liberals railing against subjugation of a foreign people as morally wrong and warning that the fight would drag on for years) were echoed later in Vietnam and Iraq.... McKinley at first resisted the Republicans but then decided that the Filipinos “were unfit for self-government” and needed “civilizing.”
- What the Americans brought – education (literacy is very high here, and this is the world’s third-largest English-speaking country) and infrastructure.
- Moving right along to the Marcos and People Power eras (I’ll address WWII separately) – Imelda is still alive and well and living in Makati.
- The June 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo ended another chapter – ash rendered Clark Air Force base unusable and the lease on that and Subic Bay were not renewed, tens of thousands of troops left and $100 million a year in rent was no more.
- I’ll end with a modern success story. Arnel Pineda was a singer in a cover band, very good at imitating the Steve Perry, the lead singer of Journey. The aging rockers of Journey had to dump Steve Augeri, who was losing his voice but who never really sounded like Steve Perry anyway. They stumbled across clips of Pineda on YouTube (speaking of which, if you want to see the movie I made, ask me for the link – I won’t keep it up there very long) and invited him for an audition. The story goes that when he applied for his visa, nobody at the Embassy believed his reason for travel, i.e. auditioning to be the lead singer of Journey. They asked him to sing a few bars, he nailed it, they issued the visa, and he got the job!