Maligayang Bati Khristine! HBD — Five Videos From Dubai, for My BFF
Maligayang Bati Khristine! HBD — Five Videos From Dubai, for My BFF
My BFF turns a year older today in Dubai, where the calendar runs ahead of California. So here are five videos from her city — an arrival at DXB, an umbrella against the August sun, a drive across the country to the other sea, and Bamboo playing for the Filipino community at Expo 2020.
In Dubai it is already tomorrow. That is the small, permanent fact of a friendship stretched across eleven time zones: her birthday arrives while I am still in the middle of the day before it, and by the time California catches up, she has been celebrating for hours without me. So I have learned to send things early.
Khristine is my BFF. She is also the reason I know the United Arab Emirates as something other than an airport layover — the reason I have stood on a beach on the Gulf of Oman at eight in the evening in September and understood, in my body, what that part of the world means by heat. I made two trips to see her: one that began at Dubai International on August 23, 2021 and ran to the end of September, and a shorter one in February 2022. Between them I filled several thousand photographs and a folder of video I have barely touched.
The photo essays from those trips are still coming. Today, for her birthday, five videos — and the story each one holds.
The Philippine pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai was named Bangkóta — the early Tagalog word for coral reef. Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez explained the choice at Al Wasl Plaza: a single coral polyp can cross an ocean and grow into something far larger than itself, and Filipinos do the same thing — traveling, migrating, and building communities wherever they land. It may be the best metaphor for the diaspora any Philippine government agency has ever put in writing.
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Kaibigan — kah-ee-BEE-gan
Friend. Look at the front of it: ka-, the prefix that marks shared being. It is the same ka- that gives us kapwa, kababayan, kasama. Tagalog does not really have a word for a friend who is separate from you. A kaibigan is someone you are with — which is why the distance to Dubai has never felt like the point.
1. The Arrival — Dubai International, August 23, 2021
This is the first thing I shot in the UAE. August 2021 was still the strange part of the pandemic: testing on arrival, paperwork, half-empty terminals, a long haul that felt longer for how few people were on it. Then the doors, and the person waiting on the other side of them.
Welcome to Dubai. Arrival at DXB, August 23, 2021 — met by the friend who had spent the previous five months telling me I had to see this city for myself.
2. First Meal, First Daylight — August 24, 2021
The next day was the first time I went out into Dubai in daylight. Note the umbrella. Nobody in California carries an umbrella in cloudless weather; in the Gulf in August it is not an accessory, it is equipment. Watching how people actually live in that heat — the shade lines, the timing of errands, the way a city organizes itself around the sun — was the first genuinely useful thing I learned there.
First meal, first time out in the daylight — August 24, 2021. Note the umbrella.
3. Stepping Outside at Night — Coral Dubai Deira
Same day, after dark. I walked out the door of the Coral Dubai Deira expecting the relief that evening gives you everywhere else, and the air did not cooperate. My reaction is on the tape and it is not dignified. This is the video I would show anyone who thinks they understand August because they have been to Manila in May.
Stepping outside the Coral Dubai Deira at night, August 24, 2021 — my honest reaction to what August in the Gulf does after sundown.
4. Across the Country to the Other Sea — Khor Fakkan
In September we drove out of Dubai to Khor Fakkan, which belongs to the emirate of Sharjah but sits on the far coast — you leave the Persian Gulf behind, cross the mountains, and come out on the Gulf of Oman, where the water turns north toward the Strait of Hormuz. It is the closest I have been to Iran. We got there just before eight in the evening, and it was still, as I said at the time, extremely hot.
For a kid who grew up between Marikina and Vallejo, standing on a beach where two seas and three countries are within a few hours of each other rearranges your sense of scale. The Filipino presence out there is enormous and mostly invisible to Americans — the workers who built the roads I drove on, the nurses in the hospitals, the crews on the ships passing through Hormuz. Khristine lives inside that world. I got nine weeks of it, across two visits.
Khor Fakkan Beach, emirate of Sharjah, September 2021. We drove from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and arrived just before 8 p.m. The heat did not care what time it was.
5. Bamboo at Expo 2020 — February 11, 2022
The second trip was shorter and had one unmissable date on it. On February 11, 2022, the Philippines held its National Day at Expo 2020 Dubai, and Bamboo played the Jubilee Stage. Khristine and I were in that crowd.
Some context worth keeping in the record. Expo 2020 ran from October 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022 — postponed a year by the pandemic, name unchanged. The Philippine pavilion, Bangkóta, was designed by architect Royal Pineda and placed in the Sustainability district. And the sitting president, invited by the UAE head of state to lead his country's national day, sent his regrets and stayed home; a special envoy went in his place. Thousands of overseas Filipino workers turned up anyway, in a foreign country, on a work night, to hear one of their own play.
That has always been the arrangement, hasn't it. The state is intermittent. The community shows up.
Bamboo live at the Jubilee Stage, Expo 2020 Dubai — February 11, 2022, Philippines National Day. Filmed with a phone, standing next to Khristine, in a crowd of kababayan a very long way from home.
Maligayang Bati
I have not been back since February 2022. The photographs are still sitting in the archive waiting for me to do them justice, and I will — chapter by chapter, this year. But an archive is a slow instrument and a birthday is not, so today the videos go up first.
Khristine: maligayang bati. Best wishes, always. Thank you for the airport pickup, the umbrella, the drive to the other sea, for standing in that crowd with me while Bamboo played, and for being the best tour guide! Have an awesome celebration. You deserve it. It is already tomorrow where you are.
Happy '29th' birthday, BFF!
• Department of Trade and Industry (Philippines) — Bangkóta pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai
• Department of Foreign Affairs (Philippines) — PH Ambassador leads opening of the Bangkota Pavilion, October 1, 2021
• Gulf News — Philippines Pavilion National Day at Expo 2020 Dubai, February 11, 2022
• BusinessMirror — Coverage of the February 11, 2022 National Day concert
• Video and photography by J.F.R. Perseveranda, Dubai and Sharjah, UAE, August–September 2021 and February 2022.
• Related on PinoyBuilt: Hogan Spartans in Dubai: A Fil-Am Reunion
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J.F.R. Perseveranda
J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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