Chamorro Village

The Everything Island Place

The weekly Wednesday night market at Chamorro Village is the place to be on island. There you can see Pacific native dancing, buy a sarong, get the loudest aloha shirt imaginable, eat Chamorro carry-out, and jostle up against military personnel, Japanese tourists, and elderly Guamanians dancing to the oldies (read: ’70s soft rock) in the Village pavilion. One-stop shopping indeed!

Chamorro Village was conceived in the late 80s, I believe, as the place to showcase traditional island culture, though it’s obvious that’s not quite how it developed. You can get traditional stuff there—Chamorro metalsmithing, knives and tools and such, for example—and there a couple retail places that sell Indonesian wood furniture. But I don’t think that chocolate is a particularly Pacific product, so I don’t quite understand the presence of the Village chocolatier, and a number of the tropical gift shops sells tacky Guam keychains and coffee mugs festooned with dolphins and hibiscus and such. In its present conception, Chamorro Village is a combination “festival marketplace” and flea market, which isn’t a bad thing; it’s just not quite what I think its originators intended.

The physical plant itself is great. There are hibiscus and bougainvillea bushes interspersed with palm trees galore, with little walkways winding around lots of Spanish-style huts with terra-cotta tile roofs. The architecture is so nice that one wonders why it isn’t replicated elsewhere on island, where most buildings look kind of, well, like concrete pillboxes. The Village backs up onto the Paseo, the island’s little baseball stadium that has a winding runwalk track encircling it, always full of nice Filipina ladies in their Reeboks out for their evening aerobic strolls.

Wandering around the stores and stalls is great fun. Which of the outdoor vendors will have the tackiest aloha shirt this week? The competition is fierce and last Wednesday the shirt with antique jalopy with surfboards in the back seat in electric blue print won by a country mile. What new silly souvenir will the impulse gift store have this week? Why, big seashells inscribed with "Guam"! On the assumption that you won’t mistake them for the seashells you collect from Nebraska, perhaps? . . . what odd concoction will be at Mt. Lam Lam, the ice cream store? Lately it’s halo halo (“hol-lo hol-lo,” not “hay-lo hay-lo”), a Filipino dessert that involves fruit syrup, condensed milk, and shaved ice, often in sort of peculiar colors. It’s very good when it’s made well, and very bad when it’s not. And finally there is lots and lots of Asian tat: Powerpuff Girl ripoffs that have faintly Asian features (Buttercup, Bento, and Bamboo, perhaps), cheap electronic games, flip flops and slippers galore, jewelry, and everything you can conceviably make out of shells, with the possible exception of kitchen appliances.

There are a set of regulars that I see every week that I go, and I’ve gone fairly regularly since the summer: Viki, selling her watercolors; Tim, the lawyer on island that I know from the pool, who has gone to the market faithfully every Wednesday for the past thirteen years; Carlos, who owns the Teak Gallery that sells teak furniture; Mark, owner of Treasure Hut, a gift store that also stocks wonderful Indonesian stuff (but isn’t in Chamorro Village, so don’t go looking for it—he just frequents the market); a number of my students, often with their kids and/or spouses; sometimes my Senators; and everybody else on island. Chamorro Village is designed for you to see and be seen.

The center pavilion is always filled with dancing Pacific Islanders of the 50 years-plus variety. Social dancing is very big on the islands, to its great credit—the mainland could take a good cue from us—and there’s usually a small live band playing covers of soft rock hits circa 1978, all behind the sweet Chamorro and Filipino couples gently swaying their geriatric hips to the beat.

Then, finally are the food vendors, which are everywhere. They hawk what you’d expect: barbeque and lots of it. Five bucks will get you a skewer of barbequed beef, two scoops of rice, the ubiquitous Guam side, a little finadenne (the local hot pepper soy sauce), a whole pile of pancit, and some kind of salad, often marinated cucumbers. Even better is marinated cucumbers with pickled papaya, which is delicious. (Incidentally, two scoops of rice come with everything. Even McDonald’s breakfast meal comes with two scoops of rice unless you specify that you want hash browns. If you move out here and are not a rice eater, you will become one.) Many people I know come every Wednesday night to have dinner, and why not? It’s cheap, good, and filling.

There’s a small stage at the Village where the Natibu Dancers perform for the crowds.  Natibu is the local troupe that has preserved (or, more likely, reconstructed) Chamorro dance—the Mariana Islands equivalent of the Hawai‘ian hula. The troupe is mostly very young people, high school on down, and they are often very good. I don’t know how authentic the dances are, and the costuming is sort of Hafa Adai Island meets Off-Broadway Road Show, but the Japanese tourists love it; you can tell because their video cameras start whirring away whenever the dancers start up. And heck, the enthusiasm makes up for a lot.

Incidentally, dancing for young people is also extremely big on island: not just traditional stuff, but jazz and hip-hop, ballroom dancing, you name it. I don’t know if there is something in the water in metro Manila that makes folks just move in rhythm, but young Filipinos are just very good and often great dancers. Can anybody shed light on this?

Comments

[Gia]

I sooo miss the plate and box lunches you can get at the Chamorro village. Are you living on Guam or just passing through? Just a bit homesick and doing some blog hopping.

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