Category: Manila

In three days, I will be leaving the Philippines. Not exactly for good – somewhat anti-climactically, I’ll have to come back for a few days later this year before I fly out again. But I’ve largely cut my ties with the country, both logistically and emotionally.

My desire to leave developed slowly. The first time I lived in Manila, way back in – God, I’m not saying how long ago – my work circumstances forced me to leave before I had gotten my fill of the place. I spent the next two years in Vietnam trying to dream up a way to come back to Manila, and once I managed to finally move back with the option of staying indefinitely, it became awfully hard to tear myself away.

Right from the beginning – or at least once I got through my “everything is wonderful” phase and moved past the initial thrill of being on my own with my own money for the first time in my life – it quickly became apparent that there were some major pros and cons to living in Manila. The pros were obvious: there was the special energy of being in a bustling 24-hour city, a place that, more than even other megacities, truly never sleeps. With well over twelve million people somebody’s always going to be awake, all the more so when hundreds of thousands of them are working in call centres on all sorts of bizarre shifts to match office hours in North American, European and Australian time zones. There were the one dollar haircuts and the two dollar taxi rides, and the temptation – which I have mostly resisted – to simply pay other people to do anything that you consider even slightly inconvenient to do for yourself. Then there was also the temptation – which I completely gave in to, at first – to go out every single night and get totally soused on cheap beer and frozen margaritas at one of Manila’s kazillion bars, drinking yourself into oblivion while enjoying the energetic sounds of those famed Filipino cover bands. And then there were the people, who I still consider to be overwhelmingly decent, easygoing, good-humoured, and just generally fun. I’ve never had so many good friends anywhere in the world, and I seriously doubt that I ever will again.

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The longer I’ve stayed in Manila, the more I’ve learned to dislike the daytime. During my first few months here I loved wandering outside in the middle of the day, soaking up the sun’s rays, sucking up the pollution, and celebrating my new life in a place without winter. With no hat or sunscreen, I destroyed innumerable quantities of precious collagen – that non-renewable resource that, once upon a time long ago, gave my skin its creepy-smooth texture. But a decade ago, who was I to care? I was young, indestructible, and drunk on the giddy joy of starting a new life far from home. (I was also quite often drunk on alcohol.)

After a while, I realized that the daytime in Manila is not exactly ideal. The sun takes its brutal toll on pale Scandinavian skin, and the air pollution wears away at a sickly Caucasian immune system. Eventually, one realizes the many advantages of staying inside with one’s dogs until the blazing midday sun makes way for soft, golden light around 5 PM – a wonderful time to take the dogs for a walk or go out to the market to buy some coconut water before the vendors close for the day.

More recently, though, I’ve learned to love the completely different world that is Manila after midnight. I’m not talking about the usual nightlife – I stopped drinking almost two years ago, I hate virtually all people, and I have better luck meeting women online than in bars, anyway. Rather, I’m talking about the night life – the unique life the city takes on well after sunset.

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When people talk about how bad the public transit in Manila supposedly is, they like to hold up the MRT as an example of all of its supposed dysfunctions. It’s so crowded!, they say. It’s always breaking down! Sometimes it even falls off the tracks! It’s a death trap!

Well, I came not to bury the MRT, but rather to… OK, not praise it, but at least offer a measured defense of it. So let me speak up on behalf of the MRT, since trains and tracks cannot speak for themselves:

It is absolutely indispensable. Manila’s train network may be woefully inadequate, with 14 million+++++ people being serviced by a total of 3 train lines (LRT1, LRT2 and MRT) with only 44 stations in total. (Compare Mexico City, a city not known for its cutting-edge infrastructure, still managed to build a whopping 195 metro stations.) And of the three train lines, all of which suffer from malfunctions, random aircon breakdowns on hot afternoons, and severe overcrowding during rush hour, the MRT is the worst: in spite of being the busiest of the three train lines, it has the smallest cars, and suffers from the most technical glitches. Being roughly pushed into a jam-packed MRT car at rush hour as the humble air conditioning struggles to keep up with the sheer outpouring of body heat is quite the experience indeed.

Nonetheless, the MRT has always been the most useful mode of transit for me in Metro Manila. For one thing, it runs along EDSA, a road which provides access to most of Metro Manila’s main commercial centres, and which you could credibly argue is the single most congested thoroughfare in the entire country. An MRT ride, though sometimes traumatic, can potentially reduce a 2 hour road journey to 25 minutes. The ridiculous 40 km journey from my home in Muntinlupa to my occasional workplace in a far-flunt area of Quezon City is only made bearable by the MRT, along with my dear friend the Skyway. (However, on a not-unrelated note, I’ll be quitting that job soon, because traveling 40 km in Manila will never not be hard.)

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Keen-eyed Bloggerbels readers will know that when I go to Alabang, I usually take a jeepney. And in the course of many trips to Alabang to eat delicious and inexpensive S&R Pizza (before I went gluten-free), drink coffee at the nicest McDonald’s in the Philippines (the one on Commerce Ave), or visit the public market to buy beef bones for my dogs (THEY LOVE IT!), I noticed something interesting.

Express jeepneys that are fortunate enough to take the South Luzon Expressway to Alabang instead of the horribly congested National Highway are required to have a gate covering their back entrance, one which can be locked shut while on the expressway – unlike most jeepneys, where you just hold on tight and try not to fall out of the back. I eventually realized that each one of these jeepney gates is, as with many things in the Philippines, unique, custom-made, and in many cases quite endearingly improvised. Each one has its own mechanism for locking, too: Sometimes involving hooks, other times wire or even string. All this uniqueness can often be quite bewildering for the passengers near the rear of the jeepney, who are asked with shutting the gate as the jeep nears the expressway.

And so, with the crappy camera that I carry around with me in my man-purse at all times, I have endeavoured to document all the shapes and sizes of jeepney gates that valiantly prevent passengers from bouncing out onto the expressway between the Susana Heights and Filinvest exits.

Aside from the crappiness of my camera, allowances also have to be made for the fact that I took most of these photos from inside vehicles that were rocketing down the highway, bouncing all over the place and shaking uncontrollably while trying to squeeze out every ounce of juice they could muster from their refurbished tractor motors. Oh, and I had to do it while trying to not look like a total weirdo creep – something that’s not very easy to do when you’re taking out a camera and photographing God-knows-what inside a crowded vehicle full of strangers.

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It’s election time in the Philippines! I have a lot of unsolicited opinions about politics in this country, but in writing this post I am aware that I am walking on thin ice. When I last landed in Manila, the immigration counter prominently displayed signs informing visitors that they would be deported for participating in any political activism. Unlike the immigration cards which declared “DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER PHILIPPINE LAW” years after the death penalty was abolished, I knew this was no joke: I have indeed heard of foreigners being summarily deported for joining in protests. (Not that I’d want to traffic drugs here, anyway – the prisons here don’t seem like very nice places to hang out for a few years.) So, you won’t see me waving any placards this election season. Instead, I’ll take the safer ground and write about the election from a cultural perspective, as a recurring event of monumental significance. I’m not trying to advocate for or against any candidate or position – I just want to share my utter fascination. Read More