Sebastian the Doggie
This is Blackbag's life story!
From Blackbag's humble beginnings starting out in the middle of a forest at a province in the Philippines to its present hangout in Los Angeles, California, here before you lies a snapshot of the life story of Blackbag:
1. Blackbag in
Calumpang Village
Quezon Province
Philippines
(1) Blackbag grew up in the countryside, surrounded by free-roaming horses, chickens, and various other farm animals. Here it is, currently posing in front of its aunt's home not too far from its birthplace.
The place is called Calumpang, a tiny village within Quezon Province located approximately 62 miles southeast of Manila, the capital of the Philippines.
Manuel L. Quezon led the push for Philippine independence from the United States back in the mid-1940s and became the first president of the young republic. His popularity was such that the nation named two places in his honor: Quezon City, located directly east of Manila, and Quezon Province, the birthplace of Blackbag.
3.Blackbag at
UCLA
Los Angeles
California
(3) Blackbag (lower-right, directly underneath the tree) pursued its undergraduate studies at the University of California Los Angeles, or UCLA. It had a quiet and undistinguished career during its stay there but it met a lot of new friends, and the experiences it had was something that it would treasure and recall with fondness for the rest of its non-life.
There are currently ten campuses in the University of California school system scattered all throughout the state.
UC Berkeley is the first of the UC schools to be founded, with UCLA being the second. Known as "Berkeley's younger sibling," both campuses have a few things in common even today: with school mascots (Cal Bears to that of the UCLA Bruins), school colors (both blue and gold -- though the shades of blue do differ), and even the "fight songs" (similar but played at different tempos and the down notes are played with a staccato beat on one of the schools) being some of the more notable examples.
The locations of the other eight campuses in the UC system are: Davis, Irvine, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz.
Click on the button below to see all the other exciting places around the world that Blackbag has been to, so far!
2. Blackbag at La Universidad de Santo Tomas
Manila
Philippines
(2) Blackbag studied high school at the University of Saint Thomas in Manila, a place of learning managed by the Dominican Friars.
The school is well known for consistently producing some of the brightest medical students in the country every year. It has a sister school in the province of Bicol called the Aquinas University.
Here you can see Black Bag (deflated) in front of the statue that greets every student as they pass through its front gates. The school was built back when the Philippines was under the rule of the Spanish crown. The Spaniards first arrived in 1521 under the leadership of Ferdinand Magellan; they colonized the archipelago and there they remained in control until the early 1900s.
It was also Magellan that gave the Philippines its name. Upon his arrival, he claimed the islands in the name of King Felipe II, the then King of Spain. Similar to how the US state of Maryland - i.e., "the Land of Mary" - was named after Queen Henrietta Maria by the colonists when they first arrived there, this place henceforth became known as "the Land of Phillip" = "Felipe nas", or if you prefer the Filipino pronounciation: "Pilipinas".
On the other hand, Manila, its capital, got its name as a result of a misunderstanding. As is wont to happen when two cultures with unrelated tongue decide to communicate for the first time, the participants relied quite heavily on hand signals for clarification early on.
So it came to pass that when the Spaniards finally found a suitable place on which to build their fort and use it as their base of operations, they pulled aside some of the natives and inquired as to what name they gave to that (pointing yonder) land over there, but the natives misinterpreted the hand gesture to mean, "What's that floating on the river?" (The Pasig River just so happens to be in the general vicinity of the foreigner's finger point, flowing right along, minding its own business.)
So the natives told the Spaniards that there's some "nilad", a sort of kelp, floating along on the surface of the river, if that's what they're asking (which they're not). The literal Filipino translation for the phrase "there's nilad" is "may nilad".
So one thing led to another with the Spaniards asking for confimation by saying "¿Maynila?" and the natives "reassuring" them by nodding and saying "May nilad." And the rest, as they say, is history.
Upon completion of its studies, Blackbag packed up its belongings and headed off to the United States.
4. Blackbag at the University of Washington
Saint Louis,
Missouri
(4) Not long afterwards, Blackbag went on to do some initial post-graduate research work in the land known as the Gateway to the West. The road was littered with various kinds of both personal, professional, and extracurricular hurdles, but eventually it was able to overcome them all and finally receive its master's degree.
Led by Hernando de Soto in 1542, the Spaniards explored the Mississippi river and the surrounding valley, but did not claim nor attempt to establish sovereignty over the area. On the other hand, the French did, and this occured during the subsequent French expedition led by Marquette and Jolliet in 1673, and that is why the name "Louis" in the city of St. Louis uses a French spelling, and not the Spanish "Luis" (nor the American spelling of "Lewis," for that matter).