Last week at this time I was kneeling on the floor, dripping sweat and swearing while I coerced a combined 150 ounces of criminally cheap liquor into my luggage. Plagued with guilt every time I left a 70PHP ($1.60CAD) bottle of gin orphaned at the grocery store, I was attempting to adopt as many as possible back to Taiwan. Visa runs can yield far more than a visa.
After a violent yet successful bout with the zipper I collapsed backward onto the floor of the hostel common room, laying my head next to the offensively loud fan hoping to drown out the noise of chickens, traffic and muggings on the street below. All it took was one unguarded, vulnerable minute for the lonely hostel lurker to strike. I had managed to avoid this guy, save for one night when I stumbled in at 2 AM to bust him getting friendly with himself, for the past five days. My luck was not to last. I spent 90 of my final minutes in Manila being subjected to an excruciating slide show of BAD photography and a drawn out, self gratifying yarn about buying cake for street kids ... “It jus' really touched my heart, ya know? These little bits must've thought I was god or something!” (He was from the UK). This guy had been in Manila for 2 weeks and had hardly ventured further than the food vendor across the street because he claimed it was too dangerous without a local escort. I'd call that a bust.
One of the only other people I talked to had been robbed at knife point in the middle of the afternoon only two blocks from the hostel. He'd been crossing a busy street with his friend when two guys pushed him behind a parked truck out of sight. Apparently his friend walked a whole block talking to himself before he realized that he was alone. Turns out the guy had all of his cash, passport and electronics on him when it happened ... Which is pretty dumb, but beside the point.
As he tells the story, after recovering his gusto he ran after the guys but couldn't find them. Instead he was stopped by a group of concerned passerby and taken to the neighbourhood representative who spent the day with him taxiing between the embassy and various police stations. Fortunately for my selfish personal enjoyment the guy had a good sense of humour and included the many oddities and ironies he encountered along the way in his tale.
All of the cops he dealt with seemed to find the incident entirely amusing and referred to him unfailingly as Joe (the Filipino title for any white foreigner, used as either a term of endearment or one of hostility depending on the circumstances – comparable to Gringo or Gaijin). They asked him what the perpetrators looked like, to which he couldn't help but reply, “Like ... You? Average height, average weight, black hair ... Filipino.” The cops thought this was hilarious. Then they asked him to look through a set of mugshots which did not seem to conform to any sort of standard - In one the guy had his arms around two babes while his face was bloodied up so badly that he was unrecognizable. There was an assortment of toothless, grinning culprits in various poses and locations, and most of the shots weren't catalogued but lying about in random stacks. Knowing that he wouldn't be able to identify for certain the guys behind the mugging, he spent a good hour going through the shots for kicks while watching American Idol with the on-duty officers in the staff lounge. He was asked by the cops more than once if he had enjoyed the company of beautiful Filipina girls yet. Cable took precedence over holsters in the budget, and most of the officers carried pistols shoved down the front of their pants. He spotted an AK-47 tossed casually on a pile of papers and other office debris. When he went to the toilet he passed by the only holding cell which had a layer of people on the floor and a canopy of hammocks supporting another layer of inmates above. While passing, the inexplicably cheerful cell occupants shouted to him, “Joe!” “Why so sad, Joe?” “What's the matter, Joe?” One guy started singing Hey Jude, and at this point he claims to have lost his mind a bit.
So, all things considered, I think I was pretty lucky during my time in the Philippines. I left the hostel alone without incident and even avoided being mugged. In fact, going in with a deep, psychologically embedded young-solo-woman paranoia I was proved nothing but wrong, ad infinitum.
With a PETA-sentiment-riling desire to see some cockfighting, I set out on my own to locate the fabled local cockhouse. I had faith in the aggressively efficient Filipino style of direction giving and stopped to ask an old man how to get to the arena. Having barely strung the words together, the man was already hailing a tricycle. He insisted that he take me there, and we squeezed into the sidecar together. This is the point where the various rob/rape/murder (in no particular order) scenarios, which are so deeply engrained in the psyche of most western women in reference to situations with male strangers, began to percolate in my imagination. Fortunately my craving to witness violence overrode my fear of becoming a victim of violence, and I was escorted into the packed arena by my spontaneous guide. As it turned out, this guy was some sort of VIP and not only did he get me in without a cover charge but he brought me to a reserved row of seats in the front, damn near close enough to smell chicken fear. He even convinced the guards to let me take pictures.
As I watched with mixed feelings of horror and morbid curiosity, he patiently answered all of my queries - “Do they eat the dead chickens after?” “How do you keep track of which one's which?” “How much do people usually win or lose?” “... Why are there razor blades tied to their legs ...?!” I was beginning to get on a bit too well with the unruly, drunken crowd around us and he kept my suitors in line with some grandfatherly-sounding chides in Tagalog. In addition to several marriage proposals and requests for cell phone photos I received opportunities to select the winning rooster, making relentlessly poor choices. That day I was wearing a Portuguese soccer jersey and despite my efforts to explain that I was Canadian I left with the nickname Portugal.
After an hour or so of gore I admitted defeat and told my escort (we never did names) that I was leaving. He had a stern conversation with one of the suitors and explained to me that the guy would show me to where I had to go. As we climbed the steps of the arena to leave there was a clamour of guys clapping him on the back, winking at me and shouting suggestive sounding stuff in Taglish. I was beginning to wonder if I had just been auctioned off to the highest bidder. The murder/rape/rob paranoia began to chafe, but again for no reason. The guy quietly led me past the scam artist cab and tricycle drivers, through the suffocating heat and to the appropriate jeepney, wished me well and sent me on my way.
This is only one example of the warmth and hospitality that is the norm. As a foreigner, getting stared at everywhere you go in Asia is expected. In Taiwan, if you meet the eyes of someone staring at you they will almost always look away to avoid eye contact. In the Philippines you are almost always asked how you are, where you are from, whether or not you like the country ... At the very least you get a smile. You could chalk that up to a more intimate history with westerners, or the lack of a language barrier, but I don't really give a shit. It's nice to be smiled at for a change. A girl that I met there gave the example of watching news coverage of a flood on CNN - People's homes are destroyed, some of their friends are dead, but you see clips of smiling people swimming and kids playing in the flood water. “That's just how people are here” she explained. I guess being screwed over in succession by the Spanish, Americans, Japanese and Americans again for a period of over 400 years led to the development of a culture that favours optimism in the face of adversity.
Nevertheless, it wouldn't be fair to paint a picture of Manila without drawing attention to some of the darker aspects. Such as, most obviously, the poverty. Most tricycle drivers, in Manila at least, are basically homeless. They sleep parked along Aurora Boulevard, legs dangling over the edge of a sidecar, inside their only means of income. They have an average income of 200PHP ($4.55CAD) per day.
If you follow Aurora Boulevard into the business district, Makati, you will encounter fully armed guards at every bank, hotel, mall, restaurant or office tower. Most of these guards carry an assault rifle with an extended clip just in case they need those extra 20 rounds to ... What? Quell a surge of desperadoes from the slums? As in any impoverished area the middle class is next to non-existent. In one neighbourhood people are struggling to find clean drinking water, while in another the lawns are manicured, the sidewalks are wide and the gates are high. Oddly enough, despite the added attention to infrastructure this is the only area in which I was ever lost and where people failed massively at giving directions.
I switched my original visa run destination from Tokyo to Manila at the last minute because of cheap flights and because I thought Manila would be more fun than Tokyo alone. Definitely did not regret that decision. Who needs unjustly lauded Kabuki theatre and a mind-boggling metro system when you can watch stray dogs chase naked kids and batter your skull inside a roll cage attached to a motorcycle? Some twisted part of me just found that to be a far more enjoyable experience.
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