TACLOBAN City was celebrating Sangyaw Festival, while the provincial government of Leyte was celebrating Pintados-Kasadyaan Festival of Festivals when I came in June last year.
It was my first time to travel to the city that was highly devastated by Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan), the strongest typhoon in the world, which took place in November 2013. Together with select Manila representatives, I felt privileged to be invited by the local government and the Department of Tourism-Region 8, headed by Regional Director Karen Tiopes, to witness how the province rose from the wide destruction caused by Yolanda.
Sangyaw Festival was organized by Rep. Imelda Romualdez Marcos of Leyte in the 1980s, but it was replaced by the Pintados-Kasadyawan after the 1986.
For years, the original Sangyaw was replaced by the Kasadyawan, organized by the Petilla family, until 2007, when the congressman’s cousin, incumbent Mayor Alfred Romualdez, chose to restore the Sangyaw. But last year, both families agreed to use the fiestas to spur unity rather than division.
At least 12 contingents from different towns in Leyte and Samar joined the Pintados-Kasadyaan Festival of Festivals on its grand parade in major thoroughfares of Tacloban and later on performed their cultural dances before a gathering of some 50,000 people at the Leyte Sports Complex.
It was a historical moment for Tacloban, as the two political clans meet and greet at the Sports Complex. Gov. Mic Petilla welcomed Rep. Martin Romualdez onstage, where he was also greeted by Palo, Leyte, Mayor Remedios Matin Petilla and then-Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla.
Later in the evening, on June 29, the city government held its Sangyaw Festival’s “Parade of Lights” with its colorful LED creations. Mr. and Mrs. Alfred and Kring-Kring Gonzales-Romualdez (Tacloban mayor and councilor, respectively), joined the parade, together with the business sector, non-governmental organizations, and various schools and organizations.
I didn’t have pre-Yolanda experience in Tacloban and based on local and international news and the social media during the onslaught of Yolanda, the city, along with the rest of Eastern Visayas provinces, was badly damaged. Roaming around the city, I noticed that except for some abandoned houses and buildings, there was hardly no trace of the monstrous nightmare.
Resiliency and the unsinkable Filipino spirit
Our first stop in Tacloban City after an hour of travel by air from Manila is the Calle Z Café on Zaragoza Street, some 10 minutes’ drive from the busy airport. As they say, the best bulalo in Tacloban is served in Calle Z. And it was true! Aside from bulalo, we feasted on bangus sisig and crispy tenga (fried pork ears).
“We were the first restaurant to reopen after Yolanda. We were lucky to be aided by the MMDA [Metropolitan Manila Development Authority]. Then, MMDA Chairman Francis Tolentino and his team were looking for a restaurant for late lunch, after a day’s clearing operation,” said Ludette Virtucio Ruiz, proprietess of the popular local restaurant.
“We opened on November 22, 2013. After the storm passed, employees were flocking back to our restaurant. They wanted to work; they wanted to help,” Ruiz said.
“We opened the café, because so many aid workers and volunteers didn’t have a decent meal to eat and a place to relax. The restaurant also became a place for reunions; a place for family and friends to catch up and gather news,” she added.
At that time, Ruiz said, money has no value, because there was practically nothing to buy. “So we learn to barter things in order to survive. Most important, we learn to value our loved ones and friends,” Ruiz recalled.
With increasing customers, Ruiz said she had to scour the local markets to as far as Ormoc for ingredients; the prices were terribly high because of inflation. The prices of consumer goods and construction materials skyrocketed in the aftermath of Yolanda. But even then, the people of Tacloban endured.
Incidentally, my meeting with Ruiz in Tacloban is a reunion of sorts. Earlier in April 2015, we met in Samar for the launch of Summer sa Samar/Spark Summer project, the tourism-awareness project of Gov. Sharee Ann Tan, promoting the provinces of Paranas, Marabut and Basey as major tourism destinations of Eastern Samar.
Finding Chew Love
Our group also visited a new restaurant which is fast becoming a family hangout in Tacloban—Chew Love—owned by Coke Young-Go, a physical-therapy graduate, who decided to go on restaurant business after the Yolanda incident. Chew Love is a former silog-carwash place which the Go family bought after a short hiatus in Davao due to Yolanda.
“I wanted to own a restaurant, a place where family and friends meet and have a good time,” she quipped. “The decorations, the fixtures and the interior design were all done by me. I’m a frustrated interior designer!” she said.
And it paid off definitely. When we came, the restaurant is celebrating its first anniversary with the soft opening of an annex structure, which reminded me of actress-singer Jolina Magdangal’s Memory Lane Restaurant in Tagaytay.
Coke said most of Chew Love’s specialties came from their ancestors, which were passed on from generations to generations, but are named and served creatively—Be Kare-ful With My Heart (Kare-Kare), Cheeky Feeling (Boneless Chicken Barbecue), Steak to One (Beef Burger Pattie with Rice) and Love at Pork Sight (Pork Liempo), Crazy Pork You, Beef My Lady and Mud-ly in Love, to name a few.
For our drinks, we tried its house specialty, Gingerly Yours, which is a lemonade infused with ginger, Mexican turnips, carrots and chayote; and the Green Mind, also a lemonade, this time infused with cool cucumber flavors.
Of course, we didn’t hesitate to taste the Gold Digger, Chew Love’s version of the Pinoy halo-halo, which uses shaved ice infused with flavor before icing. The gold is the mango bits at the bottom.
Seafood and Ribs Warehouse
We also tried Palo’s newest warehouse-themed Seafood and Ribs restaurant in Candahug, which opened in February 2015. Food preparation is paluto, where seafood and meat items are offered raw. Situated by the front door, you choose the items and dictate how you want the food prepared to the staff and it is served to your table sizzling-hot. For our group, a dinner buffet was prepared and we find the ribs, its specialty, comparable, even better than some restos in Manila.
We also had lunch at Imelda’s Buffet, another new food business which opened after Yolanda, while Tacloban’s popular seafood restaurant, Ocho Grill, hosted our last lunch for our five-day stay in Leyte. It seemed local people are willing to invest in the food business. Same with lodging places, in our case we stayed at the newly renovated Tacloban Plaza Hotel, near the downtown area.
Aside from pigging out, we also paid our respect to General Mac Arthur in the famous MacArthur Landing Memorial National Park, which commemorates the historic landing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Leyte Gulf at the start of the campaign to recapture and liberate the Philippines from Japanese Occupation in October 1944.
After which we had our eyes ogling on the treasure collection by the Marcos family at the Santo Niño Shrine. Despite its decrepit condition, the shrine still boasts of the power that was and the wealth of the past administration, which, to my rough calculation, is more than enough to rebuild the lives of Yolanda victims, who, at the time of our visit, were relocated in some outskirts of the city.
The promise to return made sooner
I was more than happy to be back in Tacloban in October 2015, this time to witness the opening of the 900th store of the country’s well-loved fast-food chain, Jollibee, in Palo, Leyte.
Some attendees can’t help but be teary eyed, as they remember the deadly experience they had during the devastating typhoon. According to them, Jollibee was the first to set up a mobile kitchen in November 2013 and did on-site preparation and distribution of hot congee offered for free to the local population. No wonder that as early as 4 a.m. on opening day, the people of Palo have already lined up for Jollibee’s opening at 6 a.m.
Jollibee Palo is the company’s 10th store in Leyte and 112th in the Visayas region. I’m glad to be part of the Manila media covering this project, because Jollibee and its agency, Strategic Works Inc., won a Gold Anvil in the PR tools category in March this year. “Jollibee 900th store” project celebrated the fast-food chain’s milestone store opening and the exemplary resilience, optimism and hope of the townspeople after the tragedy of Typhoon Yolanda.
Truly in less than two years, Tacloban is alive and kicking. For the Taclobanons, life goes on and tourism is picking up. New businesses, hotels and restaurants are mushrooming; flights are fully booked, as guests and passengers crowd the Daniel Z. Romualdez airport.
Needless to say, I enjoyed the tour of the city and food tripping around, the warmth of its people and the provincial, yet modern, life of Tacloban.
“Tacloban and the province of Leyte recovered very quickly. In two years, the majority of all foreign aid workers and international aid groups in Tacloban are gone. In any given place, the time to recover from a major calamity is usually five years; here in Tacloban, it took only two years for almost everything to go back to normal,” my newfound friend Ludette said.