Grade 5: Was confusion time. We were supposed to move to Antipolo, but it was not physically ready so we had to move to
San Lorenzo and share the space with the high school. For two or three months, we had class only in the mornings, and then the high school girls came in the afternoon. When we finally moved to Antipolo, the school was not quite finished. The multi purpose hall in fact, never got a roof while we were there. When we graduated three years later from 7
th grade, it was still topless, with steel bars sticking out from the unpainted concrete!
I remember that the nuns wanted us to wear rainboots, to protect our shoes from the mud, and none of us would have any of it. So no one ever wore those rubber boots. Now that it’s a necessity for us in
New York, I have to smile every time I have to go buy some for my children!
I took
Angara bus #103 from Unimart. Pia Baens and sisters lived far from Unimart, but for some reason, that was their stop too.
Popsie, why do I think you and your sisters were Unimart bus girls also? Back in those days, it was safe to wander around Greenhills unsupervised and so we would do that in the afternoons, while waiting to be picked up. Pia, do you remember we kept going into FUN HOUSE to browse, and I think we even bought
sea monkeys at one point. I know I did, and I tried to grow them, and got them to the little-swimming-thingys stage until I started to think about what they might look like if I let them grow some more so I flushed them down the toilet. (Okay, ASPCA, come after me now!)
I know I did not finish Grade 5 until the last day of school because a few days before it, I came down with chicken pox, that I got from Chiqui de Castro, or Gina Tambunting, or both. This year, Popsie's sister Malu was Grade 1, and in the classroom right next to ours. She was quite naughty, so... we made her do a lot of things, and she followed whatever we told her! Nuf said. Don't want to get anyone into trouble! Big sigh of relief to see that Malu grew up nice and normal.
If you went to Antipolo, then you must know who
John Philip Sousa is. Assumption's contribution to waking up super sleepy girls who got up at the crack of dawn, who got dressed by their yayas while they were still snoozing, and who dragged themselves into the vans or buses to make it up to the mountain school, was to blast martial music
ad nauseam over the loudspeakers. I can still see that blasted phonograph with the 33s and the 45s playing by itself outside the door of the library. I cannot hear Sousa music to this day and not wake up!
I won’t post anymore about Antipolo because it is your turn, I am sure we have TONS of Antipolo stories!
8 Comments:
I did love Antipolo... especially having lunch in the mango tree with Mia Unson on our special branches. I hear they don't allow the girls to climb them anymore, pity. I remember jumping down from the branches too, and Vicky Valmonte crossing herself before jumping from the highest branch any of us dared to, and not breaking any bones! I used to wear shorts under my skirt all the time.
I wish I could remember more, especially of our class nights - telling ghost stories in the tents, climbing the roofs of the walkways between the clusters. I suspect the seizure I had in college had some detrimental effect on my memory.
We rode Bus 107 with the green seats, and I remember the rivalry between bus riders as to which bus was the best and broke down the least. I remember Bus 109 had yellow seats, Bus 102 I think had horrible wooden ones. Those buses were overcrowded too, with small bench seats put down in the aisle to squash more students in!
And you know, I never really minded the daily dose of Sousa, it kind of grew on me. I suppose I'm in the minority!
I just remembered, it was not just Sousa, we got brainwashed with Martial Law melodies such as "Bagong Lipunan" - May bagong silang, may bago ng buhay, bagong bansa, bagong galaw, sa Bagong Lipunan....
...Magbabago ang lahat, tungo sa pag-ulad, at ating itanghal, Bagong Lipunan! Oh my God it's burned into my brain!
Great blog. I'm not from your batch (I'm from '82) but surprising how most of your memories fit in with ours. We were Bus 103 passengers too and I knew Unimart like the back of my hand. But I don't know who John Philip Sousa is.. I remember Popsie from the bus but not her sister Malu, who's now a good friend of mine. I was also one of those girls who moved to Herran a yr earlier (grade 2) bec my sister moved to Grade 4. And I loved Herran too. During recess time, I'd walk around by myself sometimes, trying to get lost in some areas we weren't supposed to be in - back of the auditorium or the nuns' bldg.. thinking of how my mom and lola were in the same school. I even went back about 5 or more years ago w/Carlos Celdran (who's known for his Manila walking tours) - We snuck in the back (employees only). Wanted to see what happened to the chapel where we had our first communion. It was a locker for employees. But the most shocking part was the floors (maroon?) were still there and some hallways. It was really trippy. But now, they really tore everything down bec of further renovations. All gone, incl the chapel. Brilliant blog. We will soon follow suit I'm sure.
Hey, Anna! I remember that great big tree that somehow was spared during construction of the Antipolo campus. Lisa and Nikki Barbes who became very close friends in the year or so they lived in the Philippines went to Antipolo, and I got Nikki in trouble by getting her to climb trees with us too. I wore shorts under my skirt too...though I hated the PE shorts because they were synthetic and I didn't like to wear synthetics.
Sousa marches--like Monica I can never hear them without thinking of
Antipolo. Or the words of a song I'd learned as a student at the international school in San Salvador, which went to a Sousa march: "Be kind to your fine feathered friends, every duck may be somebody's mother..."
Buses...I must have been on the same bus as Monica, since I lived in
Greenhills. I remember the Fun House selling little novelties and Mad Magazine. I remember that my sister caught lice from another kid who rode on the bus, to my absolute horror since my sister and I shared a bathroom!
I remember a house built up on stilts, which we drove by on the way up into the hills--it was a landmark for the drive to school. And one day when we were on the way home from school when the sky had turned an ugly yellow color and we had an electrical storm, and saw tornadoes.
I remember there was a table outside each classroom in a cluster, where we would park our lunchboxes and had to shoo away bees at lunchtime. And
thermos bottles--the ones with glass liners that always broke! To this day I keep a couple of them, out of nostalgia, but also because they are so much more thermally efficient than the "modern" unbreakable stainless steel versions.
I remember someone...was it Yvette de Leon? answering a question about
Magellan (I think) with "he was the first to circumcise the world". :)
And who was the teacher addressing our class one day, when a positively
gigantic rat ran out along the top of the blackboard behind her?
LOL Mia, we weren't classmates anymore in grades 5-7 (they deliberately separated us, remember?) and I wish I could have seen that rat! And circumcise the world....! ROFL!
Oh my I remember that tree...huge mango tree, somewhat leaning on its side, in a big hole? ditch? I loved to climb that tree!!! Yes, horrible navy blue synthetic PE shorts. UGH.
Gads, Sousa music.....can ANYONE forget that? Like a maor clashing of cymbals every 5 minutes. And the Bagong Lipunan music not that much better...
I remember having to stop doing whatever you were doing as soon as the Angelus came over the speakers. This was true whether you were running down the hill to get to the vendo machine first, walking up the stairs or just getting out of the classroom. The world stopped, literally, for those few minutes. To this day, I can say the entire Angelus verbatim...
I WONDER HOW ASSUMPTION ANTIPOLO LOOKS LIKE... TATAY ROLAND SAID ITS A HUGE PARCEL OF LAND WHICH SIMILARLY LOOK LIKE A SMALL VILLAGE WITH ITS OWN COMMUNITY... SCHOOL, IS THERE A CHURCH TOO, A ZOO... OH WELL HOW I WISH I CAN HAVE THE CHANCE TO GO THERE WITH MY FAMILY...
Patrick Charles Santos Mabutot
grade 5 - St. Agnes
ms. lani
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