We awoke on our second morning in Manila to the sound of a bizarre rooster call-and-response musical number. One rooster would begin its throaty yodel, then a crowd of them would shout back. Around 8 a.m. there was a cacophony of chicken sounds, as though the whole gang of them were whipped into a frenzy by some predator or other danger. Or...boredom. Who knows? Half-asleep, I remembered the Kenny Rogers sign on the fence and wondered if Kenny himself butchered the losers of the local cockfights.
Rising and rubbing the sleep from our eyes, Jenn and I found that we felt few effects from the previous night’s drinking; whoever San Miguel was, he was clearly not the patron saint of hangovers. Alex and friends were still sleeping by the time we left. Unsurprising considering I heard them up talking shop well past three in the morning. Hey, eccentric inventors, amiright? Most Sunday mornings, we would have slept in along with them, but this particular Sunday we had a date in Makati: our good friend in Seoul, Kate, had hooked us up with her buddy in one of Manila’s hip downtown districts, and he had invited us to join him at the Legazpi organic market that weekend.
Not feeling quite up to navigating the combination of Jeepneys, tricycles, and trains that would be necessary to reach Makati, we opted to take another cab (this would become a familiar theme for our first few days in Manila). Granted, it meant spending up to ten times as much as public transportation, but that still only added up to a few dollars. Before long, we were in front of Makati’s upscale Greenbelt, a complex of malls that we had no business in except as a meeting point. We watched a security guard check the undersides of cars with a mirror on a stick as they entered the parking lot. There seems to be a great deal of security going on in Manila.
Troy wheeled his shopping trolley up to meet us exactly on time. He’s a friendly sort, a professional writer who came to the organic market every Sunday after yoga. Clearly, we would get along just fine. This time he didn’t have long to look around the market and buy produce, as his sister-in-law had just given birth in a hospital across the street from the Legazpi market and around the corner from Troy’s house (I still cannot begin to imagine a life in Manila so devoid of traffic, but it must be incredible).
Troy walked us around the assembly of white tents and folding tables. The market was abuzz with fruit vendors, barbecue stalls, handicraft merchants, and hippie drum circles, though for some reason these are the only photos we got of it:
When he wasn’t busy picking out coconuts or spinach, Troy showed us around and gave us some advice about traveling in the Philippines.
“So when are you leaving Manila?” he asked.
“Oh, we were thinking maybe Thursday.” As a former resident of a major Asian city, I knew that we were spending a rather brief time in Troy’s home city, and that he probably had a list of a hundred places we should go or see. “I know it’s only five days in the city, but...” I apologized.
“Wow, why so long? You should get out of here sooner!”
It was then that we remembered what Kate’s Lonely Planet: Philippines had said: if you want to really, really take a long time seeing Manila for some reason, here’s a four-day itinerary. Wikitravel had concurred, and its “Get Out” and “Stay Safe” sections had been nearly as long as the rest of the article. What strange sort of place was Manila that tourists and locals alike recommended getting out after only a short stay? I thanked Troy before he left to visit his new niece, then rejoined Jenn, who was making conversation in Japanese with a friendly couple from Tokyo who were selling marked-up products from Daiso (everybody’s favorite ¥100 store!).
We walked away from the market an hour later with a mango, an avocado, a bottle of all-natural hand sanitizer, full bellies, and a newfound favorite flavor of ice cream (chili tamarind, which tastes just like spicy Coca-Cola). Needing awhile to rest after all that sitting and eating, Jenn suggested we retire to a neighboring park to draw pictures and write. Thus we passed another hour in Manila happily.
This is one of our favorite travel activities: it’s creative, relaxing, a good way to take in the local sights, and above all, free. I almost hated to leave, but we needed to buy swimsuits before we headed up to northern Luzon in a few days, and...actually, no, I completely hated to leave. Shopping is the exact opposite of sitting and drawing, and it’s probably our least favorite activity while traveling (perhaps ranking slightly above “emergency room visits” and “embarrassing tattoo removal”). We dragged our feet packing up our art supplies and walking back to Greenbelt, but we stopped only to do this:
The next two hours were somewhere between “harrowing” and “tooth-gnashing.” We wandered from mall to mall in central Makati, from Greenbelt 1 to Greenbelt 5 to Landmark Department Store to SM Mall and back again, all in search of swimsuits to fit our fat American asses. Generally speaking, there are many more Filipino people of comparable size to us than there are Japanese or Koreans, but somehow the swimsuit industry has left a large part of its market uncovered (so to speak). We pushed and jostled through crowds, up escalators and back down, past indoor concerts and MC Escher-inspired architecture, and had our bags searched by security guards at the entrance to every mall we passed through, pausing only to sit down on the floor and take deep breaths. It’s not that Manila’s malls were bad by mall standards -- indeed, they would have fit in quite well in Hollywood or west St. Louis county -- more just that, at least for us, malls are wretched by human being standards.
At last, we found the swimsuit department at the Landmark, where we could pass another blissful hour comparing swimsuits and realizing that all of them were unsuitable. It seems that the Filipino swimsuit tradition is to provide the same amount of padding or support in the...er...chestal region, regardless of the garment’s size (that padding being roughly the size of a Tostito’s-brand corn chip). In the end, Jenn decided that she would just wear a spare bra under a tank top while swimming, with the added bonus of having a tank top to wear in the Manila heat.
Tired, dejected, utterly burned out on shopping, the Philippines, and life in general, we retreated to Makati and decided to recuperate at the American Embassy.
That’s right: Shakey’s! The correct kind of mindless consumerism!
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