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Rainbow in the bathroom sink (sounds like a ska song), Alila Resort.

Us: Hinde, Muchacha.

Ubud is extremely laid-back and relaxed, making it a great vacation place. The sidewalks, where there are sidewalks, are very narrow, and in town they’re covered with pink stone slabs with gaps just wide enough to sprain your ankle on. While you’re minding where you step cars are whizzing by on the two-lane road which is really a one-and-a-half lane road, and motorcycles are trying to squeeze between them. It’s an accident waiting to happen, and the amazing thing is that these accidents don’t happen. Because no one is stressed about the possibility of an accident!

We can’t live here, the lack of stress would kill us.
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Arrived in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia in the dead of night and woke up to this.

The Ubud festival is not a showcase of lumpia but a gathering of writers and readers. Ubud is where the last part of Eat, Pray, Love happens. We sat through that movie yelling “Ang laki ng problema mo!” at the screen, but Ubud is fairly spectacular. Likelihood of running into Javier Bardem: zero. We’re more likely to hang out with Anton Chigurh, his character in No Country For Old Men.

We’re at Alila Resort, in a villa surrounded by vast fields, trees, rice terraces, mountains. It’s gorgeous! What have we done to deserve this?

Absolutely nothing. Life is unfair. At 3am we leapt into the shower, and in the morning we realized that the shower has a view.

Hmmm. Modesty, or a shower after walking up and down tropical Ubud at high noon? No contest. Luckily we’re too old to get expelled from school and the only real danger is to passing water buffalo.

Breakfast is served at the Plantation Restaurant, where the staff understands late nights and jet lag and allows you to order cereal at 11am.

They had us at rice porridge.

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News flash: Summa at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival (UWRF) Media Centre got us interviews with Chang-Rae Lee and Jeffrey Eugenides. Help! Post your questions for the authors of The Surrendered/Aloft/A Gesture Life and The Virgin Suicides/Middlesex/The Marriage Plot in Comments. Incisive questions, okay? Make us sound good in the podcasts.

You need to see this movie.

Francisco “Paco” Larrañaga was 19 when he was arrested, tried, and found guilty of the rape and murder of Marijoy and Jacqueline Chiong. For the past 15 years he has maintained that he is innocent, that he was not in Cebu when the crimes occurred, that he was not acquainted with the Chiong sisters or all his six co-accused. The former culinary school student underwent a judicial trial memorable for its bizarreness, and the kind of trial by publicity that makes one wonder whether the media is even interested in feigning objectivity. Larrañaga has been sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment, then death, then life imprisonment again, and now exile in a Spanish prison. Under the rules of the Spanish penal system, he could get parole – if he admits that he committed the crimes he has vehemently denied. Welcome to the Theatre of the Absurd, as lived by Paco Larrañaga of Cebu, Bilibid, and now Spain.

Read Give Up Tomorrow: Into the labyrinth of the Philippine justice system, our column at InterAksyon.com.

Jezebel by Irene Nemirovsky is available at National Bookstores.

We enjoyed Jezebel, a novel from the 1930s about a beautiful upper-class woman accused of killing a much younger man presumed to be her lover. During the trial she is reluctant to say anything in her defense—the reason for her silence becomes clear as we read her history. Fascinating portrait of self-absorption.

In the Old Testament Jezebel was a woman who introduced the worship of Baal in Israel; her name has come to mean “shameless and immoral female”. At dinner with Consolata and Chus, we compiled a list of local synonyms for jezebel, to wit:

kiri
kerengkeng
talipandas
hitad
haliparot
pagirpir (First we’ve heard of this, apparently a Batangueno term)
hostess (from 1960s Tagalog movies; early GROs)
baylarina
bellas (Shouldn’t this be a compliment?)
pampam
pokpok
putaching
paka (from the 1970s, short for “pakawala”)
hotsie patotsie (from the 1950s)
kalapating mababa ang lipad (What’s a low-flying pigeon got to do with it?)

Add to the list.

Michael Chabon’s books are available at National Bookstores.

We know Michael Chabon loves comics, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, The Lord of the Rings, science-fiction, martial arts, 1970s records, 1980s TV shows, grindhouse features. This is the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Where is the movie we’ve been waiting for?) and Unitard Theory after all. We remember an essay he wrote about the 2008 US presidential election in which he compared the victory of Barack Obama to bringing water to Arrakis. But we were still surprised at the sheer thrilling geekiness of his new novel Telegraph Avenue. You can turn to any page and it will contain some reference to comics, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, LOTR, SF etc.

Sample: Steeled by a lifetime of training in the arts of repression, like Spock battling the septenary mating madness of the pon farr…

If you can take that on every page, no, every paragraph, this book is for you. We’re on page 146 and our attention hasn’t flagged. It reminds us of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Which we also loved, so no problem there.

We know exactly three places at Maul of Asia: the IMAX theatre, Uniqlo, and Sebastian’s. Last Saturday we were at MOA for a movie premiere and we took a detour through the ice cream parlor. Our favorite flavor is Once In A Blue Moon: blue cheese ice cream served with honey and walnuts (Php140). Yeah, we love our kesong may amag (Mmmm stinky cheese, corpse cheese, stuff that smells like something dead). This blue cheese ice cream is sharp, but not blue enough to scare off non-fans. You have to try it.

Our friend had the Mangga’t Suman ice cream, which tastes exactly like…mangga at suman! We haven’t had the Manggang Hilaw with Bagoong ice cream, but we love the concept.

After the movie we crossed the ocean of traffic to get to Teresita’s of San Fernando on Tomas Morato corner Scout de Guia in Quezon City. Yes, we live in Makati, went to MOA for the movie, and then went all the way to QC for a very late dinner. And it was worth it! The taxi fare cost us more than dinner.

Teresita’s is descended from the famous Razon’s Halo-Halo of San Fernando. We had the embutido (Php105 with rice), which is excellent, and the kare-kare (Php105 with rice), which is heavenly. The kare-kare is thick and gooey—it’s like drinking peanut butter. You have to eat lots of rice with it to soak up the viscosity from the roof of your mouth. As Noel puts it, Best 105 pesos we’ve ever spent on food. In fact we’re just about ready to crown it Best Kare-Kare, unless you have other nominees.

After the main course we drank hot tea and took a 15-minute recess from eating. Then we had dessert: the famous halo-halo with langka (Php95). It’s the finely-shaved ice that makes the difference. Best Halo-Halo.

So for Php200, you can have a full meal that is exponentially more delicious than fast food cardboard. Our memory of Teresita’s kare-kare was so intense, we hardly ate anything the next day—we could still taste that peanut buttery goodness.

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The Quattro Formaggi Story

A diner ordered a four-cheese pizza at a restaurant, and when it arrived she freaked out. She berated the waiters, shouted at the kitchen, demanded to speak to the owner. The owner arrived and asked the diner what her problem was. “I ordered the quattro formaggi pizza!” the diner yelled, “And they served this!” She indicated the pizza on the table. It looked exactly like…a quattro formaggi pizza.

“May I ask what’s wrong with it?” the owner said.

“Can’t you see?” the dinner shrieked. “Look at that! May amag ang cheese ninyo! (Your cheese is moldy.)”

It was Gorgonzola. Of course it was blue.

“My child was going to eat that!” the dinner went on, horrified. “I’m not paying for that!”

The owner told the furious diner that the meal was on the house so she would go away.