The Niki de los Reyes-Torres Carroza Challenge Year 3: Saying Goodbye to an old Friend

I haven't posted anything regarding this year's Carroza Challenge due to the really hectic schedule I had to juggle as of late. I still had to do a last minute check on the deliveries for a mall before my flight. This proved to be more than a challenge but also a series of miracles. [for the benefit of the readers who have no idea what a Carroza is, a Carroza is a tiered, decorated platform upon which images of Roman Catholic Saints are placed/mounted, usually with wheels, used in processions for holy week and certain feast days and days of ritual significance.]



Since the Carroza we have been using before has succumbed to termites and rotting, we had to build the wooden tiered platform from scratch once again -had it built in pieces to be bolted once it arrives at our ancestral home in Antique province. The pieces had to travel by ship and almost did not make it through, but the divine has ways.

So as i bid goodbye to the old one, here's to the rush of the new... Like many things, the impermanent remind us that if we don't take care of what we have, we might just lose it -and that applies to a lot of things in life as well.




Still a long way to go before the Maundy Thursday Procession...Breathe...


Thus spake the Barefoot Baklesa

Can i just Say?

I slept in rather late, my body was a little worse for wear from the day before -unusually cold summer day that went all humid on me- But i woke up a while ago feeling as if the world is going my way. And that nothing, not even Uncle FreUd with a few lose screws in his head, can ruin this day...

I'd like to share this wallpaper from Bon Bon Underwear which pretty much sums up what I feel today...Enjoy!!!



Thus spake the Barefoot Baklesa

that's one way of looking at it...

This was a posted by a dear friend, colleague-in-the-arts, and fellow kakulitan, Sir Mike Villanueva about my Santino post; and he is quoted thus:

"Duno if this connects. But lately I've been toying w/ the thought that Filipinos/the Philippines in general is as Catholic/Christian as it is Democratic - translation: only in name.
That being christian & democratic are fashionable masks worn and beneath this thin veneer is a face the nation is collectively ashamed of so there is an unspoken collective effort to keep it under wraps.

Prof of mine is of the opinion that the country has a nature that's sort of Schizotypal: pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships as well as by cognitive or perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior.

Or in a nutshell, saying/proclaiming one thing and doing the exact opposite. This would conform w/ a study I heard the KBP did over 10 years ago.
They determined the mental age of Filipinos in general and concluded that as a whole the Philippine population has the collective mental maturity of a 10-year old and so game shows, fast-paced, colorful, no-brainer production became the norm for a race that IN GENERAL struggles to differentiate fact from fantasy as well as holds on to Hope to the point of being Delusional.
Gee, my comment is longer than your blog. ;D"

i will have much to say about this soon; yet the easiest for the time being is I AGREE...


thus spake the Barefoot Baklesa