avelynn98

this was an awesome experience. check out sivananda.org i was in the teacher’s training program for a month and stayed in a tent! the air here is clean, the water is fresh, and you can never do too much yoga up here. i met a few locals, all of whom are from somewhere else: new york, montreal, england, and all of them love this little village. more importantly, it’s got the mountains, the lakes, the rivers. i highly recommend it.

my son had the time of his life last summer, visiting my boyfriends’ parents while i was in school for eight days. it’s certainly still ‘rural’ even though 13,000 people live in this “city” (i’ve lived in boston, l.a., baltimore, and in the metropolitan d.c. area and if you did, too, you might not consider claremont a city!). anyway, it’s got a wonderful little historic town, and all of the residents are waiting for the day that claremont will once again be a booming city like it was in the old days.

i’ll always have claremont close to my heart because my partner is from there. and if i didn’t meet him, i would have never known about claremont!!

my mom was probably the first person to leave nueva vizcaya for the united states, unless there’s someone else we don’t know about. after we visited in 1980, she continues to visit the philippines almost ever year.

we stayed in nipa huts, and swam in the river. i was eight years old when we visited. there was neither electricity nor cell phones at the time. my 10 year-old has visited the same place (more specifically, nueva vizcaya) and he said he watched movies in someone’s home “in the province”. so i guess that means televisions are commonplace now!

my son’s grandparents lived in yapton-near-arundel for quite some time, so we visited them before they left for spain. if you’re looking for the ‘real’ england, go to yapton.

i grew up here… before the ikea and the commuters showed up. my mom and i used to steal fruit from the lemon groves and other places… haha.. don’t tell anyone.

i grew up in southern calfornia for nearly half of my life. i live on the east coast now. it’s very different from the west coast, and i would definitely go back there to live there again. i thought about going to grad school to study asian american studies, and since there are a zillion of my people out there (filipinos!), what better place to study it?

people this california is all celebrities and blond skinny girls, but if you want to know the real california, it is steeped in asian american history.