The Araneta/Cubao OTS was my first time to visit that part of Metro Manila. I had, of course, heard of the Araneta Coliseum because of the 1975 Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manila,” but I did not know anything else about the area. As a foreigner, the OTS is the hardest competition for me, because an OTS typically requires a certain amount of cultural knowledge for what makes an iconic, or at least recognizable, shot. In the week before the OTS I started asking Filipino friends and colleagues what they thought of when I said “Araneta” or “Farmers Market,” and the most frequent thing I heard was to watch out for the “jumping shrimp.”

Farmers Market was not what I expected. I have been to wet markets throughout Southeast Asia, especially when I lived in Vietnam, but Farmers was by far the biggest and most orderly wet market I have seen. I really enjoyed wandering through the seafood stalls and the meat stalls, trying to guess some of the cuts of meat that I had not really seen before. The vegetables had some great color, as did the flower stalls (and their owners). Of course, a giant foreigner wandering into a local market causes some commotion – it’s the observer effect in action, where my very presence changes what is going on. Market patrons would come up to ask me what tour group I was with and how I was enjoying myself. While I could almost never get a candid shot of people just working, all the vendors – especially the butchers – wanted to show off for me. One person pulled out an entire cow’s head he had in a cooler for me to see, while another person came and grabbed me from one row down to show me his stack of eyeballs. The seafood vendors liked to show off the water-spitting oysters, but by the time I found the shrimp I heard so much about they were mostly just twitching.

Overall, visiting Araneta and the Farmers Market was a fun experience for me, and I will be taking my wife back to see the wet market – and maybe next time get my picture of the “jumping shrimp.”

Brent Christensen has been with CCP since April 2011 and is sponsored by Eric Cachero.  He is due for regularization on May 2012.