Manila 3: Intracurricular

Day three in Manila, and we were already feeling a little burned out.  Perhaps we would follow everyone’s advice and move up our plans to leave the city after all.  First, however, we had spent few of our tourism dollars doing touristy things, so we felt we had some obligation to see the city’s proper sights.  Today we would wake up early and go right for the most obvious tourist district, Intramuros.  Wikitravel and Lonely Planet had a wealth of information about the walled-off old city, all of it tantalizingly historical.  Perhaps we would find a quiet place around the Plaza del Roma to draw pictures of one of the famous Baroque churches?  Alex had asked us to meet us at his lab in Cubao at 6:00 for some dinner, so we had the whole day to spend planning our next move and exploring the corners of Intramuros.  Also, today we would eschew taxis and finally take local transportation like local people, pinkie-swear.

When we left Alex’s home in Marikina, we began to hear hoots and catcalls from passing tricycles and Jeepneys.  We were drawing a lot more stares than usual from the locals as well.  By the time we had made it to the main road to catch a trike to the train station, we deduced that it was due to Jenn’s new tank top.  And thus was the sacred bond of the pinkie-swear broken: we hailed a cab, uneasy about exploring an infamously shady public transit system while drawing extra attention.

Intramuros was immediately historical, hectic, and hot, even at this, the supposedly coolest time of the year.  Private schools were crowded next to fast food restaurants, street vendors, churches, convenience stores, and surprisingly little in the way of parks.  Every three or four minutes we found ourselves fending away pedicabs or tricycle drivers who wanted to give us guided tours.  By the time we had found San Agustin (the oldest church in the Philippines) to be surrounded by touts and depressingly few places to sit and draw, we discovered that we were too hungry to continue tourist-ing anyway.

Source: http://www.wheninmanila.com/

Here we encountered another of the great traveling dilemmas, one with which we grapple every day of our awesome, awesome existence: where do we eat?  The most obviously appealing choice as fearless world travelers is to dine at any of a dozen local canteens, dirty-looking, crowded places, and eat shoulder to shoulder with the residents of Intramuros.  What more authentic way to get to know a place than by eating with the locals?  Plus, local places tend to be cheaper (as in “less than $2 for two people to get full” cheaper) and more delicious than chain restaurants or tourist traps.  The only problem with this option is that we would be abandoning the advice given to us by our perpetual guardian angel, Kate: “Don’t eat the food that’s been sitting out all day unless there’s a fire going under it.  Otherwise, you’ll get hella diarrhea.”  (Note: I may be taking some liberties with Kate’s sparkling personality.)

So, if we are too chickenshit to eat at one of the turo-turo restaurants (meaning “point-point,” an establishment thoughtfully named for the only way we know how to order any of the dishes (also it’s so nice they named it twice)), then how are we to fill our bellies?  There were a few extremely upscale tourist restaurants in Intramuros, ones categorized under “Splurge” in Wikitravel; we attempted to peer into the door of someplace called “Illustrados,” and got so far as looking at the menu before we politely asked ourselves to leave, as we were getting poor person germs on the fine rug.  Also, I ain’t payin’ no $10 for no pasta con funghi.

We finally settled this dilemma as we do all dilemmas: waver back and forth for awhile, carefully consider how each choice relates to our overall travel philosophy, then just pick randomly when we’re too hungry to argue anymore.  The result: moderately tasty and entirely non-poisonous chicken adobo from a tiny local canteen!  It was cold, but we still avoided getting diarrhea (this time, anyway).

Then, of course, we instantly squandered our Traveler’s Karma Points by spending an hour in a coffee shop using their overpriced WiFi (and really, isn’t any WiFi that isn’t free overpriced?).  But hey, our escape from Manila into the greater Philippines wasn’t going to plan itself.

By 4:00, we realized that this may be our last chance to redeem ourselves for the morning’s cab ride.  It was time to brave Manila’s Jeepneys all on our lonesome.  We scrambled across a few busy roads and hopped the first Jeepney heading to Cubao that didn’t have people hanging from the back door.  We made fast friends with the other passengers by studiously speaking in low voices and avoiding eye contact with anyone else (this is friendly by Japanese public transit standards, anyway).

Source: http://www.bubblews.com/

Navigating in Jeepneys is a bit of a puzzle, as due to the vehicle’s low, narrow windows, we could only see a narrow band of our surroundings at about nipple-height.  I pretended I could tell where we were by looking at the destinations written on other Jeepneys, but really all this accomplished was getting myself attached to a few particular Jeepneys (where are you now, Dragonball Jeepney?).

When the rest of the passengers hopped out at a traffic jam that was presumably somewhere in Cubao, we followed suit, then painstakingly made our way to Alex’s lab by asking a series of increasingly irritable security guards.  Success!  After only two and a half hours and about 40¢, we had made it across town!  We cheered, then coughed up lungfuls of smog for ten minutes.

Manila 2: Malls of the Philippines and Other Horrors

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!

Manila 1: The Return of Kenny Rogers

We stumbled off the plane from Incheon, our heads muddled, our bodies utterly baffled by the temperature change, but our backs refreshingly unburdened*.  This was the first time in a month we had been outside with fewer than three layers of clothes and a winter coat -- humidity, by now, was such a distant memory that the warm wetness of the Manila night brought tears to our eyes (and dampness to our underarms).  The exit of Ninoy Aquino International Airport was crowded with touts offering taxis, even at 1 a.m. on a Friday.  We were well prepared for any trickery, having learned well from our time in Bali that we sleepy travelers were easy prey for thieves, beggars, flim-flam men, charlatans, kidnappers, and...quislings.  No, we were much savvier now than before: the best way to navigate this sensitive intercultural dance was a good offense.

“NO, WE’RE FINE, THANK YOU,” we snapped at the polite young woman with a badge and a clipboard who asked if we needed a taxi.  Told her, you betcha.

*For the extremely continuity-sensitive among you, we left our heavy sleeping bags, air mattresses, winter clothes, bowling balls, heavy coats and pots and pans with a friend of a friend in Seoul, and also I only lied about one of those things, we seriously carried all the rest of that stuff from Kansas to Korea, also oh my god what were we thinking.

When at last our taxi arrived, we laid down our arms just long enough to be whisked away to our hotel in scenic “somewhere close to the airport.”  The ride was long and frantic, the cab cutting through tumbledown villages and blowing through security checkpoints.  It all looked so refreshingly different from Korea: even in the dead of night, it was all so colorful, so warm, so excitingly dirty.  The driver honked at the security guard who was napping near the hotel.  Such friendly camaraderie...mabuhay indeed!

After a good night’s sleep (which came quickly after watching a documentary about Caligula on the room’s TV), we set out to explore Manila, the first stop on our month-long tour of the country.  Neither of us knew much about the Philippines; I had a childhood friend named Juan-Paolo in Seattle, and we’re both big big fans of Manila Luzon, but otherwise our knowledge amounted to a few bouts of research on Wikipedia and a handful of half-remembered bold terms from history textbooks (American history education, you’ve done it again!).  We did come armed with a Lonely Planet guide to the Philippines helpfully donated by our friend Kate, and we had divided the chore of researching our newest destination on the plane: Jenn read relevant chapters from the guidebook while I...um...

For our first day, we planned to take a cab from our hotel room to our first Couchsurfing host’s place in Marikina City, a quiet suburb to the south (or possibly east) of metro Manila that Wikitravel assured us was home to “the World’s Largest Pair of Shoes” and “one of Asia’s most disciplined people and Asia and healthiest and most likable people.”  Nifty!  A quick taxi ride to our host’s house, drop off our stuff, then explore Manila for the rest of the day.  (I assure you, the hubris of our plans seemed much less obvious at the time.)

This cab ride was much less of a whirlwind than the previous night’s, mostly insofar as we spent an hour in traffic and another half hour thoroughly lost.  Our cab driver, a jolly older fellow, kept quiet and let us take in the sights of Manila, which were schizophrenic.  First we barreled through a ramshackle village that reminded us of Bali: houses constructed of scrap metal, hand-painted signs above “canteens,” children urinating in the street, piles of garbage by the side of the road.  And then, suddenly (well, suddenly for Manila traffic), we seemingly found ourselves transported back to downtown L.A., staring at gleaming skyscrapers and crawling down wide, palm-lined boulevards.  Ads greeted us from every corner, representing a curious parade of American brands that somehow made it huge in the Philippines: children played around a giant bottle of R.C. Cola, and a trio of well-dressed young Filipino people smiled and invited us to eat at Kenny Roger’s Roasters.

Now, our host (whose name is Alex) had given us his address in Marikina and a collection of helpful landmarks to give our cab driver.  Naturally, the driver had heard of none of them, but when we got to Marikina, he was good enough to pull over and ask a security guard in for directions.  The security guard was pretty sure we were making up the names we rattled off to him, but at last we deduced the general neighborhood to aim for.  For the next half hour, we asked one local after another, old men the driver summoned to the window by calling “Boss!”, middle-aged women who disputed one another’s sense of direction, young women who refused to stop to help.  Nearly everyone gave it their best shot, though, and after a great deal of circling to find any combination of the words “New,” “Mountain,” “View,” and “Village,” we arrived at our destination with much rejoicing.  We tipped the driver handsomely (I think?), bringing the bill for our two-hour ride to about $11.

Source: Alex

We let ourselves in with the key Alex had left for us, then decided to regroup until we were sufficiently rested to explore the town.  After regrouping for half an hour, we realized that we were far too hungry for pure tourism, so we went out to wander the streets of Marikina in search of food.  A walk, a meal in a local diner, a long wait in a grocery store line, and a trike ride (more on this later), and we were back where we started, slabbing out on Alex’s floor until he came home from work.  Whoever Alex was, he was a spartan individual: the house was large, with two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, though really any classification of the rooms was guesswork at best, as Alex owned virtually no furniture at all.  It was a wonderfully empty place to find ourselves after a month in a goshiwon (a closet that resembles a dorm room) in Seoul.  Alex’s place is almost like a monastic retreat.

At last, Alex got home.  He is a tall, Southern nerd, the kind of guy who’s so excited about what he’s telling you that he gets out of breath.  In fifteen minutes, he told us all about his work here in the Philippines on a machine that makes solar panels.  Alex, then, is the sort of person to whom words like “startup” and “venture capitalist” are a part of his daily life rather than, say, concepts in a Malcolm Gladwell book.  He also briefed us on his new rule of the house: no electric lights. 

“Wow, cool!  Why did...uh...why?” I asked.

“Eh, just kinda to see if I could do it.  6 months, no electric lights.”

We extinguished the lights we had left on and lit candles...who were we to argue with an eccentric inventor?

His “scruffy inventor friends,” as he introduced them, arrived then and began laying out their things.  They too were tall, Southern nerds, both with names that rhymed with “lawn.”  Both of them lived in Hong Kong, and all three of our companions were extremely excitable about their chosen profession.

With not a moment to lose, Alex led his crowd of houseguests on a walking tour of the back streets of Marikina, which, at least in this neighborhood, tended more towards Bali than L.A.: scrawny dogs roamed the streets, a long, seemingly abandoned concrete building was home to graffiti and weeds beyond counting, and right around the corner from his house was a fenced-in yard filled with roosters, some strutting about the grounds, some caged.  Tied to the barbed-wire fence was an ad for Kenny Rogers’ Roasters, who apparently delivered.  We would later become extremely well acquainted with these roosters, but at the moment we had no time to consider them; our host had a goal in mind.

He led us aboard one of the Philippines’ famed “Jeepneys.”  A Jeepney is a rehabilitated  WWII Jeep with an elongated body, or at least a faithful recreation of one, typically decked out in outrageously airbrushed artwork.  Some have portraits of the Virgin Mary next to Iron Man or Captain Jack Sparrow, others bear tattooish nightmares and have their names written in sharp, Gothic font, names like “FAST TRUCK” or “PRINCESS CHARLYN,” “GOLDEN HAWK,” “X-ECUTIONER,” “MONEY MAGNET,” “THE MIDWIFE.”  There was even a “JENNIFER,” if you can believe it.  The overall effect is a sort of neo-retro-cyberpunk-pinball machine-meets-bumper-car-meets-the Muppet band's bus.

Anyway, our intrepid host marshaled us onto the first Jeepney headed in a suitable direction.  We squeezed in, knees to our chins, squashing onto the seats with the locals and passing our money up to the driver like absolute pros.  Then, of course, we had to make absolute asses of ourselves with our iPods.  Alex cheered us on by chanting, “OK, guys, ha ha, OK.  OK.”

We boarded a veritable fleet of Jeepneys that night, all headed in one direction: up the mountains and away from Manila.  Sometimes the Jeepneys were all full, but such is not a problem for a Filipino (or stalwart tourist), as there was plenty of room hanging onto the back like a Southeast Asian Marty McFly.

Eventually, the five of us made it to the spot Alex had picked for our first night in the Philippines.  It was a collection of traditional wooden huts set into the hillside with a traditional Filipino drink menu.  It was called “Leonardo’s.”  We drank our San Migs happily as we talked about precognition and shoveled down plate after plate of Filipino food.  Jenn and I had heard rather negative things about Filipino cuisine before this trip, and this was not quite disproven over the course of the evening.  Basically, every dish we were served was delicious up until the last word of its description (e.g., “crispy, sizzling tofu drizzled in hot...mayonnaise”).  Still, we ate and watched the city late into the night.

When at last we had had our fill, Alex, Jenn, Sean, John and I hiked still further up the mountain in search of something to quench the thirst that we had earned by all that mountain climbing.  Somehow, we found ourselves at a karaoke bar (how does that keep happening?) and proceeded to strut our stuff all over the hillside.  The three inventors were great singers and an even better audience for Jenn’s masterful rendition of “Hot Stuff,” which they greeted with whoops, riotous applause, and cries of “Oh my god, seriously?!”

Alex and John, no slouches themselves, wowed us and tickled themselves with Disney songs.

When the night grew late, Jenn moved on to the Temptations, which the karaoke machine accompanied with pieced-together footage of Tiannemen Square, Bon Jovi, Barack Obama, and Princess Di cradling children in her arms, and we all started to freak out a bit.  It was clearly time to go home.  We got back to Alex’s place and collapsed, the smell of mosquito-repellant incense filling our noses as we fell into deep sleep that was interrupted around 3 a.m. by a chorus of very confused roosters.