In May of 2007, the LAGALAG moleskine notebooks looked like this:
14 months later, the notebook is FAT with stories to share from 20 Filipinos around the world.
14 months later, it landed on my doorstep via express mail and duty bound, I had to fill up two spreads. So here they are:
A tattoed military man in Japan rescues a dying man inside a car.
A writer in Cambodia loses himself in a foreign land through a painful ritual.
A former recording artist discovers new wells of creativity in Canada.
A man in the gaming industry prowls the streets of Manila in search of lost messages.
They have never met each other but they are bound to share one amazing journey around the world. They are just four of the twenty Filipinos in Lagalag, sharing one thing in common – they all take pictures.
Twenty different ways on how Filiipinos see the world.
Twenty photos. Twenty stories.
One destination. Your doorstep.
Dadaan ba sa iyo ang biyaheng Pinoy?
LAGALAG: The Traveling Journal of Filipinos Project
I interviewed Wil about Project LAGALAG back in May of 2007. This was as memories served me right, the first podcast interview I’ve ever recorded.
After finishing my two spreads I had wanted to deliver the moleskine personally to the next guy as he was based in Makati. I held back.
The novelty – the mystery of reading about the personal accounts of many other Filipinos I’ve never met seemed to be even more charming than reading it from a blog – which practically is the same thing. There really is some charm to it. The personality of the author’s penmanship, the awkward strokes on the edges of the paper, the glue and felt marker stains …