Manila | Bloggerbels

Car Talk with Car Man

January 20, 2016January 21, 2016 bloggerbels 2 Comments

Hey there, car fans! Car blogger Car Man here with his first installment of Car Talk with Car Man.

When you meet me, the first thing you will notice about me is my car. It is the latest model of car, four doors for easy entry and exit, with a slick black paint job and heavily tinted windows. The tints are crucial because nobody who’s not in a car is worthy to gaze upon the majesty that is Car Man.

Car Man lives in Muntinlupa City, the South. The South is car country. Down here, we love cars, and Car Man is no exception. We have the South Luzon Expressway, built so that our cars can go FAST. In fact, that’s why they call it an EXPRESSway. Ha, ha! Just a little car humour for you from Car Man, the car guy.

As you might guess from his name, Car Man goes everywhere in his car, with no exceptions. Some people may say, “Car Man, having a car in Metro Manila gives you more options, but aren’t there times when it might be easier to not take your car? For example, when you have to go to Greenbelt or Glorietta by yourself, wouldn’t it be more practical to take a comfortable aircon express bus for 40 pesos than to spend 160 pesos each way on toll alone, plus gas and those hefty Makati parking fees, plus the stress of freeway driving and Makati traffic?” But of course, Car Man knows that “practical” is just another way of saying “too poor to take your car everywhere all the time, no matter how inconvenient it is”. If Car Man started occasionally travelling in vehicles that were not cars, he would no longer be Car Man. And aside from the loss of status, can you imagine all the paperwork involved in legally changing his name to Bus Man?

Besides, do you know how much car Man makes? It’s a lot of money compared to someone who makes a lot less money than him! True, he may spend a quarter of his income on gas, toll and car loan payments, but that is a small price to pay for the freedom and status that come with being Car Man. Even if Car Man sometimes has to borrow money for his mother’s diabetes medication, at least he always has money for toll. Because really, once you make a certain amount of money here, you have to be a Car Man. Once you’re in this income bracket, you need to hang out at the kinds of high-end places where Car Men are expected to hang out, and you need to go there in your shiny new car. It is important to give clear, frequent indicators of what socioeconomic class you identify with. Otherwise, what would your friends think? They might think you’re kuripot or jologs or baduy. Car Man is none of those things; he is a cool guy with a car. Hey ladies, check out my car! Let us engage in sexual intercourse in the back seat of Car Man’s car.

By the way, do you know what Car Man hates? Jeepney drivers! They stop abruptly in the middle of the road to pick up and drop off passengers, without considering the inconvenience they cause to Car Man and other men and women in cars. Jeepneys and buses are obviously the sole cause of Metro Manila’s traffic problem. If each person in those jeepneys and buses were driving their own Pajero, the traffic problem would disappear.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed the first edition of Car Talk with Car Man, and I look forward to talking cars with you again soon. I’m Car Man, and I love my car. Because in Metro Manila, there is literally no other way to travel.

Buffet 101 and the Modern-Day Vomitorium

July 15, 2015July 16, 2015 bloggerbels 1 Comment

Tonight I had an experience that is quite rare for me: I ate at a high-end buffet. Given my notorious stinginess and my staunch “I don’t eat out in Manila unless it’s canteens, pizza or fast food” policy (which will get its own post, of course!), it takes some truly unusual circumstances to drag me out to the high-end smorgasborgs which have sprouted up throughout the Metro.

As it happens, this high-end buffet served as a most unusual location for a first date with a local woman off an Internet dating site. (What can I say? I’m trying to get out more.) For some reason, she decided that such an ostentatious choice would be ideal for the first meetup between two total strangers; with my usual suaveness, I informed her that I would only eat at such a ritzy establishment if it were birthday or if someone were treating me. Although I expected her to simply lose interest and find another dining companion who wasn’t a stingy jerk (or who was currently celebrating his birthday), she surprised me by insisting that she’d pay for both of us. After a few incredulous rounds of “Do you really want to pay for me?” and several affirmative responses, I finally accepted. I was pretty baffled, but since it’s not every day that strangers offer me expensive meals, it was hard to say no. So, after meeting up with her in Makati and wandering around the malls for a few hours, abusing the free karaoke machine demos in music stores and searching for a pepper mill – more of the makings of a great first date – we ended up at Buffet 101, which touts itself as the longest buffet line in the Philippines. (Incidentally, I did manage to find an inexpensive pepper mill, and I expect my nose to be very happy during the coming weeks and months.)

Buffet 101 is one of several highish-end buffets that can now be found in Manila and other major cities, along with such competitors as Dad’s, Yaki Mix and Vikings. A meal at one of these restaurants could run you between 500 and 1200 pesos ($11 to $25 US), which sounds like a pretty wide price range, but all are equally unaffordable for your average indigent rice farmer or sidewalk cigarette-and-mint vendor. These massive food-based amusement parks have popped up all over Manila, Cebu and Davao as the aspirational middle class continue to seek out new ways to celebrate the sweet life. Or, to put it another way, they provide a helpful answer to the nagging question: “Now that I have all this money, what can I spend it on so as to avoid giving it to the poor?” Read More

I Will Name All of My Sons and Daughters “Skyway”

July 12, 2015July 15, 2015 bloggerbels 1 Comment

In Metro Manila, there are two inevitabilities: not death and taxes, as taxes are all too frequently evaded here, but death and traffic. However, that is not to say that the soul-crushing weight of traffic is evenly distributed throughout the Metro: the road network that links together the 17 cities and municipalities of Metro Manila ranges from potholed one-way side roads plied by bicycle rickshaws to monstrous twelve-lane expressways choked with trucks, buses and shiny new SUVs, and traffic conditions can vary wildly from road to road, hour to hour, and day to day. Some general traffic trends can be discerned, as when millions of commuters travel each morning from their homes in the suburbs (mostly in the north) to the business districts of the centre, then pour back into their suburban enclaves in the evenings. Each week also brings, with grim predictability, the great and terrible Friday night exodus from the Metro, an apocalyptic spectacle wherein millions of Monday-to-Friday Manileños leave their offices and boarding houses to slowly honk their way back to the relative peace and quiet of their home provinces. But amidst all of these recurring patterns, one of the most remarkable features of Manila traffic is its sheer unpredictability. Of course, many of Manila’s impromptu traffic jams are caused by obvious factors like rain, road accidents, and naked, mentally ill men walking down the middle of busy freeways. On the other hand, other traffic flare-ups seem almost inexplicable, like the impassible midnight traffic jams I’ve found myself in at Pasay Rotonda, or total gridlock in a sleepy residential area of New Manila on a Saturday afternoon.

Given the massive socioeconomic disparities that are pervasive in Manila, it’s no surprise that one’s experience of Manila traffic can vary wildly depending on one’s level of privilege. It seems a bit silly that many people would apply the word “commuting” to both an underpaid service worker inhaling hot, toxic air while trapped inside a crowded jeepney for two interminable hours of stop-and-go honking, and to an executive being shuttled to their office by their driver inside an air-conditioned SUV equipped with pitch-black tinted windows to protect them from the unworthy eyes of the masses while they catch up on business e-mails and watch funny YouTube videos on their iPad. But still, although money may buy comfort, it cannot buy you freedom from the time-sucking daily reality of Manila traffic. The three MRT and LRT lines offer commuters a chance to soar above the gridlock, but at the price of sacrificing any basic notion of personal space, and with constant risk of getting groped or pickpocketed. The only people who can really beat the system are the lucky few with access to private helicopters – and even then, they’re still constrained by only being able to travel to locations that are equipped with helipads, which feels like an indignity all its own. Read More

Things I’m Grateful For Today

July 12, 2015July 13, 2015 bloggerbels 2 Comments

After a two-week hiatus from blogging, it seems fitting to dip my toes back into the compositional world by writing something even more frivolous and unstructured than usual. And although my blog posts have been all roses and sunshine compared to the misanthropic bile I used to pump out during my angsty teen years (and let us never speak of it again), it still might be time to take a “positivity break” from all the death and guilt and pangolin poaching. Here goes!

First of all, I’m grateful that the last two typhoons that whipped by the Philippines brought thoroughly underwhelming amounts of rain and wind to Metro Manila. Although there were times that the nonstop cloud cover and slow, steady rain became oppressive in their sheer unceasingness, it was also a great time to be at home in my underwear, listening to the rain pour outside while cuddling with my extremely hydrophobic dogs. And now that the sun has come back, I can think of it as a familiar friend instead of just a cruel tyrant zapping me with UV rays against which my pasty skin is ill-equipped to defend itself. (If one of the subsequent typhoons during the current rainy season turns Metro Manila into a giant lake, I’m going to regret writing this.)

I’m grateful for lazy, sunny Sundays like this one – days when I can’t hear much outside my house except for the blowing of the wind and the constant chirping of birds, even as I potentially annoy my neighbours by blasting Scarlatti keyboard sonatas on my computer speakers. (Sorry – I hope it’s not too loud! It can’t be nearly as bad as the tone-deaf karaoke that blasts out from the house a few doors down on some weekends, anyway…) Read More

Life Without Water

June 18, 2015June 30, 2015 bloggerbels 1 Comment

Day 1: Around 6 PM on a Friday night, the running water gets cut off in my house. I spend the evening working at home while feeling dirty, itchy and gross, and decide to cheer myself up by going out to buy myself an unhealthy snack at the 7-11: a bottle of beer and some chicken asado siopao.

While walking to the 7-11, I notice a party taking place at a nearby house is known throughout the village for its loud, late, and frequent celebrations. I stop to ask if they have running water, and after informing me that they don’t, they insist that I join them for some beer and karaoke. Who am I to say no?

In the course of imbibing Red Horse and singing Funky Town and other super hits from the ’70s, I get to know a few of my hard-partying neighbours. One of them informs me that Maynilad, the Manila Water Company, will be doing maintenance from 6 PM to 6 AM every day for the next week. I contemplate this news while entertaining a great deal of attention from several gay men. After politely refusing the request of one man, who I had just met, to sleep over at my house, I head home to snooze off the Red Horse and the Funky Town. Sadly, water is still off.

Day 2: I wake up around 8 AM to the sound of running water inside my house. As I stand up from my bed, I immediately connect all of the pieces in my head. “Oh shit!” I say aloud, to no one in particular. Consider:

My bathroom has a faucet near the floor used for filling buckets, which is the traditional Filipino method for showering and flushing toilets (though I do have a proper shower head and a toilet with its own flush, as well).
If water is not running, it is difficult to tell when the faucet is closed – there is no increase in pressure as you move it into the “on” position, so you must memorize the positions and be very mindful of where you leave the switch.
Recently rats have begun to crawl into my house through the bathroom drain, which is connected to another drainage area in the back yard. As such, I have gone for the rather low-tech solution of covering the bathroom drain with an old pestle when I’m not using the shower.

With all of this information in my mind and the sound of running water in my ears, it only took me a few seconds to realize that I might see something very bad when I opened my bedroom door.

Sure enough, I opened the door to see my house flooded with water that had been running steadily for about two hours. It had long since overflowed from the bathroom and spread out into my guest bedroom, my living room, and all the way to the kitchen. My first thought was of my electronics, so I rushed to my surge protector on the floor and discovered that it had burnt itself out, literally caved in while immersed in a deep pool of water. I did turn off the main circuit breaker for the house, but in retrospect I can’t remember if I did this before or after I unplugged the surge protector – in other words, I could have conceivably killed myself. Since I live alone, my dogs could have eaten the face off my decomposing corpse before anyone found out.

I spent the rest of the morning trying to clean up the water without the benefit of indoor lighting. I swept into the dustpan, poured the dustpan into a bucket, and poured many buckets of very dirty floor water down the toilet. I stopped halfway through to shower off my thick coating of sweat, then resumed my sweeping. Once the water levels were low enough, I moved on to mopping. After three hours, I was done. I went to the mall to treat myself to some especially unhealthy fast food and buy a new surge protector, without yet knowing how many of my electronics I had destroyed through my recklessness – I was giving them time to dry off first.

I returned home to test my electronics. My laptop had been safely off the floor, but I had no idea if plugging it into its previously dampened power supply would fry it. Miraculously, aside from the imploded surge protector, everything worked fine. I spent the rest of my day filled in bliss and gratitude, and celebrated by cooking huge portions of pasta primavera and ginataang kalabasa’t sitaw (squash and string beans in coconut milk) with a very dear friend. We watch Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief, which is a pretty dire piece of cinema. Next time I get to pick the movie!

Days 3 & 4: I find myself fully in the groove of coping with the water cuts. They’re long, but at least they’re predictable, so I can keep my barrels and a wash basin full, do my nightly jog and shower before 6 PM, and I’m good. My knees ache a bit from hours of bent-over sweeping on the previous morning, but I still manage to get in my daily jogs. This week will be over in no time!

Day 5: On Tuesday, I am surprised to find the water cut earlier than usual, at 1 PM. I haven’t had the chance to fill my water stockpiles completely. I don’t take my dogs for an evening jog because I can’t spare the drinking water that they will so thirstily consume afterward. My shower with a pail is a bit meagre, and doesn’t quite leave me feeling clean. While walking back to the house from some errands, I notice a large announcement from Maynilad posted on the community bulletin board. I stop to read it, using my mediocre Tagalog skills, hoping to shed some light on the suddenly unpredictable schedule of water cuts. Before I can read the announcement to the end, my womanizing neighbour passes by on his motorbike and offers me a ride home. Who am I to turn down a ride from such a handsome young man? Off I go on the back of his motorbike, like so many ladies before me!

Day 6: I wake up to discover that the water has still not come back. I am forced to forego my usual morning ritual of washing the dishes that have piled up since the last water cut started. The dishes are already looking pretty funky, and I still have no sense of when the water will be turned back on. I start to really wish I had been paying more attention when my landlord showed me how to turn on the electric pump for well water, which earlier tenants used before Maynilad began providing service to our neighbourhood.

I have a work meeting in Quezon City the next morning, so I decide to make the trip up that night after traffic on EDSA dissipates, and grab a short-term hotel room – preferably one without mirrors on the ceilings. According to MMDA’s realtime reporting, northbound traffic on EDSA can be heavy until as late as 11:30 PM – Manila traffic is a topic fully worthy of its own blog post, one that will be written in due time. I get on the bus at 2 AM, which is generally not considered the safest thing to do in Manila, arrive in QC without incident, and check into a hotel, 38 hours after my last drop of running water. As soon as I enter the room, I take advantage of the running water to shave off the thickest beard I’ve ever grown. My mass of facial has achieved truly monumental proportions, partly as a protest against the lack of running water, partly because beards are in now, and partly out of sheer laziness. After I finish my shave, I have an extremely satisfying hot shower, crawl into bed, and fall fast asleep.

Day 7: I start my day in QC by reading my eBook about ExxonMobil over a leisurely McDonald’s breakfast – still my favourite breakfast in Manila! I have no difficulty making use of the free coffee refill as I learn about ExxonMobil’s devious struggle against Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan government. From there I proceed to my meeting, which is pleasant and productive. My colleague suggests that I can check at the Barangay Hall to find out if Maynilad is distributing emergency water supplies to its customers.

On the way home to Muntinlupa, it starts raining hard. I stop to pay a bill at a pawn shop nearby (because you can do pretty much everything at pawn shops in the Philippines), and the cashier cheerfully informs me that the water came briefly in the morning, but is now gone again. In other words, when I get home I can expect a full toilet and nothing else. The rain is too intense for me to visit the community bulletin board, so I take a tricycle straight home. I still get soaked on the way, but am sadly unable to squeeze any of it out into my toilet or wash basin.

I do, however, get a true royal welcome from my dogs. They rush out into the rain to greet me, yelping with joy. The house is still filthy, my dishes are still covered with two-day-old toothpaste, I now smell like wet dog (though that part is admittedly kinda cute), and there is nothing I can do about it. I make an urgent trip to the bathroom and waste about ten litres of filtered drinking by dumping it into the toilet bowl to flush down the contents. In my misguided efforts at rationing this relatively expensive water, I repeatedly underestimate the amount that must be dumped into the toilet, thereby causing me to use even more in the end. As I consider the monetary value of that single toilet flush, I feel very decadent indeed – this must be what The Good Life is. Nonetheless, I do not look forward to a Day 8.

Fun With Beans at Alabang Palengke!

June 16, 2015June 17, 2015 bloggerbels 2 Comments

As much as possible, I like to buy my fresh produce in Manila at the traditional market (or palengke) instead of the supermarket. I don’t do this as an affectation or an attempt to be “quirky”, and I don’t do it out of a desire for authentic cultural experiences. After having lived here for this long, I am no longer searching for the exotic, and at this point pretty much everything feels normal to me, anyway – it’s just my everyday life.

What remains, however, is an appreciation for the friendly, casual chaos of Manila street life, with vendors crowding the sidewalks and shouting out alluring descriptions of their wares. I like it even more when I compare it to the stifling corporate culture of the malls and supermarkets. Market vendors are more fun to talk to and more likely to joke around with me (even if it’s at my expense), without fear of being fired by their malevolent corporate overlords and quickly replaced with another minimum wage-earner in the single-minded pursuit of maximum profit.

Plus, the vegetables at the market are fresher!

When I want to grab a few things in a hurry, there are plenty of vendors in my neighbourhood that will do the trick, including a small local market. But if I feel like buying so many vegetables that I risk tearing the straps off my heavy-duty eco-bag, I usually go to the Alabang Public Market. The Alabang district of Muntinlupa City is known mostly for housing old-money types in high-end, heavily fortified gated communities like Ayala Alabang; it’s also becoming increasingly important as an up-and-coming business district. However, away from these moneyed enclaves and closer to the expressway, you will discover that Alabang also boasts plenty of lively street life, from a seemingly endless supply of sidewalk sock vendors to the charmingly dodgy karaoke bars and surplus TV stores that lurk underneath the viaduct. Best of all, you can experience it all without some of the more pungent odors that your nose might pick up in more crowded areas of Manila.

Alabang is just a short ride from my house, so let’s go!!! And buy some beans!!!

To get there, we hop on a passing jeepney along the highway. Given the swarms of jeepneys that dominate the roads in the Philippines (and have earned them the moniker Kings of the Road – and verily, they are cruel tyrants), it’s not a long wait. In fact, if you have to wait 3 minutes for your jeep to come in Manila, you’ve waited too long! Sorry, sucker!

We’ll be taking the expressway to reach Alabang without getting caught in Manila’s notorious traffic, and not just any jeep is street legal for that purpose. Only jeepneys with jerry-rigged gates at their rear entrances are judged worthy to pass through the Gates of Toll, presumably so that passengers don’t simply slide out the back at 80 km/hr – something that would certainly be within the realm of possibility. Interestingly, each expressway-ready jeepney gate seems to be a unique piece of hand-made craftsmanship. The number of different ways that they slide, lock or are tied into place is truly impressive, like an infinite number of unique and precious snowflakes that allow public utility vehicles to legally travel in the winter wonderland of the expressway. The jeepney driver brusquely instructs the passengers to close the gate before the jeepney enters the expressway, and the passengers closest to the back are stuck having to fumble their way through each completely unique door-closing mechanism.

Life On the Fault Line

June 14, 2015June 14, 2015 bloggerbels Leave a comment

Recently, PHILVOLCS (the Philippine Institute of Vulcanology and Seismology) released its Valley Fault System Atlas, mapping the West and East Valley Fault Lines that cut directly through Metro Manila. After two years of research, residents of the Metro and nearby provinces can now see exactly how close their homes are to fault lines that have the capacity to unleash earthquakes with a magnitude of up to 7.9.

Considering that the Atlas arrived hot on the heels of the massively destructive Nepal quake, which measured somewhere between 7.9 and 8.1, the new publication has made people understandably skittish. The fact that there have been no major quakes along the Valley Fault System in several hundred years has been taken by many as a sign that we’re past due for The Big One, though I suppose you could just as soon argue that it means the chances of The Big One happening anytime soon are pretty low.

Of course, just releasing an atlas that makes the risks so disturbingly visual doesn’t actually increase the risk to anyone. My house in Muntinlupa City is really, really close to the West Valley Fault, the potentially more dangerous of the two. I really, really love my neighbourhood, and the idea that it could be reduced to a smouldering heap of rubble is pretty upsetting to me. The thought of seeing my beloved dogs buried under piles of rubble from collapsing houses next door, both of which tower over my modest and somewhat rickety one-story house, is not a very nice thought at all. For a while, I thought about moving somewhere safer after my current house lease ends, even if it meant tearing myself away from a place that has truly become my home.

But risk is a funny business in the Philippines. In my home country, wherever that is (somewhere in North America or Europe, I think), really big natural disasters are a rare occurrence. On some years we may see floods that ruin people’s basements (which is probably one reason nobody has basements in the Philippines), but when it happens, it’s considered something extraordinary. In the Philippines the only uncertainty facing us each year is: regular typhoons or supertyphoons? When each year pretty much guarantees flooded streets and houses as a bare minimum, with the risks escalating from there all the way up to death, you have to look at risk differently. No wonder bahala na is such a big hit here.

So, if the Big One does come, I only pray that my fellow Manileños and I will come out lucky and unscathed. And if that’s too much for ask for, I will at least hope for a quick and relatively painless death for me, preferably under something large and heavy enough to squish me without too much wasted time. Not that I’m hoping for anything more than many more happy days in Manila – it’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon, the sun is shining, and it’s finally stopped being so damn humid here. Plus, my dogs are looking really comfortable sleeping on the floor next to me. I’m pretty sure they’re quite happy in their total ignorance of seismology, and maybe I could learn a thing or two from them.