Woe NAIA

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Ninoy Aquino International Airport or NAIA, Manila and the Philippines’ premier gateway is in the spotlight once again. Sadly, it is not that type of spotlight that would showcase this oft-derided airport in the positive light.

This comes with after repeated incidents of passengers being caught by airport security ostensibly because they were carrying some bullets in their luggage upon inspection, a charge being denied by the passengers involved and are in turn crying foul over them being framed for the crime.

(courtesy of Trending News Portal)

These incidents have become known as “laglag bala” or dropped bullet incidents, a new low for the airport whose reputation has been in the low for quite a while now.

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Happy Birthday, Heneral Luna!

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Today marks the 149th birth anniversary of one of the most colorful personalities in Philippine history, not to mention one of the most renowned Filipino military geniuses, the “Heneral” himself, Antonio Luna.

courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

And this year’s commemoration of his birth comes at an interesting time, right at the heels of the unprecedented success of the film “Heneral Luna,” the biographical film based on his life. Thanks in large part to the film, more and more people are becoming more aware of this man, his legacy, and his life’s tragedy.

Thus, today the Urban Roamer pays tribute to this man on his natal day, in an urban roaming way that we often do here, as we look at a couple of places here that bears a connection to his life and legacy.

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Cyberpreneur Philippines: Soon Off the Shelves

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It started with a blog post I published here in The Urban Roamer early this year. Soon enough, it got quite a lot of attention that a book publisher contacted me to contribute for an upcoming publication based on my original blog post. After some back and forth with the publisher, I eventually agreed to take part in it.

The rest, they say, is history. And history was indeed made with the release of that aforementioned publication, a groundbreaking book called Cyberpreneur Philippines.

The publication of this book is quite a personal milestone for me. For one, I am now considered a published author, even if I wrote just a chapter there. Second and most importantly, it is a great honor and privilege to be part of groundbreaking work, one of the first books in the country, if not the first, that deals with the ins and outs, the whys and hows of making it in the online economy as a cyberpreneur or being an online business owner and/or freelancer that takes into account the Philippine setting and experiences of fellow Filipino cyberpreneurs.

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Remembering A “Forgotten War”: The PEFTOK Korean War Memorial Hall

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The Korean War that raged in the Korean peninsula from 1950 to 1953 is dubbed by some as “the forgotten war,” forgotten in the sense that it rarely gets much attention as it gets sandwiched and overshadowed in history by World War II during the 1940s and the Vietnam War during the 1960s.

Nevertheless, it is an event that deserves to be given much attention as well considering it was the first armed conflict that erupted in the context of the greater tense atmosphere brought about by the Cold War era, as the United States and United Nations allies fought to stop the Soviet and China-backed communist North Korea from overthrowing the democratic South Korea and control the peninsula in the process.

The Philippine Korean War Monument in Goyang City, South Korea (source: personal archives; see https://goo.gl/GfKze6)

Also deserves to be remembered are the Filipino soldiers who participated in the war as part of the United Nations contingent in defending the nascent South Korean state from the brink of invasion. These 7500 men were part of the Philippine Expeditionary Forces to Korea or PEFTOK. And for 5 years, they were stationed in this then fragile part of the world trying to keep the peace.

In their honor, a museum and memorial was opened in 2012 near Fort Bonifacio, the PEFTOK Korean War Memorial Hall.

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