Parks and Recreation
There’s a lot to be told about a city or town by looking at its public parks. There’s just something endearing and sophisticated about a place where we see people reading a newspaper or a book on a park bench, kids chasing and jumping after butterflies or doves, picnicking families, youngsters practicing the latest “dougie” variations, or just plain hanging out, playing board games, relaxing under the canopy of trees.
This is Sunday fare – a little tamer, homier and less greener – at our very own little park, of course, Plaza Rizal.
Today is Pres. Carlos P. Garcia Day
The late Pres. Carlos P. Garcia, the 8th President of the Philippines, is without a doubt Bohol’s most illustrious son.
R.A. 7448, in April of 1992, declared the 4th of November each year to be a special non-working holiday in the whole of Boholandia to commemorate the anniversary of the late Pres. Carlos P. Garcia. But with close inspection to the law, it didn’t in fact name November 4 as Carlos P. Garcia Day, only that it a special non-working holiday. It did however ‘designate’ Nov. 2-6 as Carlos P. Garcia Week.
But of course by all intents and purpose, today is Pres. Carlos P. Garcia Day.
All Along the Watchtowers of Bohol
The view takes one’s breath away.
But once these were real stone sentinels that stood to wave off the dreaded sea raiders of the time, preventing communities from being plundered and villages dispersed by vicious attacks that take countless breaths away, quite literally.
Courageous as we Bol-anons may be, with a Tamblot and Dagohoy strain in each of us, one Spanish colonial record even describing the people from Bohol as “very valiant, and very different in valor from the other villages” – seafaring marauders at one point were the lords of the seas, feared with good reason.
Prologue
