The second part of the Filipino Tales unit was much more lively and had more creation stories to explain why certain things of the world are how they are currently. A lot of these stories used personification which I think could be fun to try in future stories. The story I liked best was "Why the Ocean is Salty." In this story, there was a giant world builder, Ang-ngalo, who made the world for God. While he was going about his business one day, he saw a beautiful goddess on the other side of the ocean. She beckoned him to her and asked of him a request. On his way through the ocean, Ang-ngalo made caverns in the ocean floor through result of his footprints. The goddess was the goddess of darkness, and she was quite tired of her dark accommodations in the world. She asked the giant to build her a purely white mansion to help liven up the place. He went about building this mansion for her, but the only material that white was salt. So this is what he built the house with for the goddess. Ang-ngalo employed millions of workers to carry the salt and help him build the house. The salt had to be transported across the ocean which disturbed Ocean's peaceful sleep. To make all the noise stop, the Ocean sent waves to destroy the building of this house, and all the salt sank into the ocean. This explained why the ocean is salty today.
Why I liked this story was because there were two influential goddesses that were able to affect a lot of change in the world. Just because the goddess of darkness asked, millions of people went to work to create her a beautiful mansion. In contrast, just because the Ocean was annoyed after so much time of building, she just destroyed millions because she could. This is strength and power without apology. More female characters would be well suited to take on these characteristics that are often given to men.
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