Finding Sagada with a Fork (or spoon. or your fingers.)

It's how enthusiastically the people who go there talk about food that draws others to it: "Big servings, not so pricey!" Back when I still worked in an office, my co-workers showed me food pictures of a recent Sagada outing they had taken. "So cheap," they told me breathlessly as I leafed through shots of big plates heaping with toast and side vegetables. I remembered hours-long road trips with my Aunt in California, past tunnels of redwood and cliffs overlooking the ocean and pit stops with plates filled to the rim with local crops and homemade pancakes. "Just like the States," they giggle. "Just like the States."

Lemongrass Tea at the Yoghurt House. Demeter, who owns a reader's cafe, once told me
 its local name so I could look for it in the Saturday market but I have since then, unfortunately, forgotten.

It's been said that to know a place is to eat it (in the form of what is served locally of course). Pateros is the Balut; Batangas, the lomi. Binondo is Chinese food, with its fried siopao and dumplings that go beyond their stripped down, streetwise distant cousin, siomai (to be completely truthful, I don't know much about food as local identity, but I'll get to the point, I promise!). 

There is nothing of Sagada that you can see in their food, is what I've heard from unimpressed foodies. "It's all just bastardized Western food."

Most things glitter and is really gold in Abu Dhabi

The Atrium Dome, inside the Emirates Palace

"Oh, everything in Abu Dhabi is gold," laughs our cousin Jam. We had spent the better part of the afternoon gaping at the many luxury cars that seemed to be commonplace on highways, and the many luxury hotels that studded the coast like rhinestones, "they have gold in their teeth, on their fingers, in their hair, under their deserts...it's like gold is just another decorating material!" She brought us inside the Emirates Palace, a seven star hotel where a night could cost up to fifteen thousand pounds, and everything is trimmed in gold, where the topmost floor is out of bounds for anybody who isn't an Arabian Royal. We looked up at the ceiling, our heads dizzy from all the vacuous chaos of luxury. The child in me wondered if once upon a time in the desert, someone had found a jinni and had asked for boundless prosperity, and the jinni, ever wise, gave him oil saying "this gold will have you prosper," and that was how all of this came to be.