Manila Update

Tagalog Word of the Day: Magkano? = “How much?”

When I first came to the Phillipines, the one thing I had my heart set on doing was going to a water park called Splash Island – I read online that the entrance fee was only 250 pesos, which is a bit more than $5, and I figured it was just the kind of break I needed. Unfortunately, when I landed, JB and JC set me straight – Splash Island is a good 90 minutes out of Manila, too far to travel by anything but bus.

I realized as soon as I mentioned it I had made a bit of a cultural (or at least regional) faux-pas. It was like flying in to Miami and asking to go to Wild Waters – they just kept suggesting various historical places and museums, and I felt stupid for wanting to go on a water slide. I realized my half hour of research on the internet hadn’t really prepared me for all the possibilities Manila had to offer, let alone the rest of the Phillipines.

Still, there was one other place I had on my list, and tourist-haven or not, I had to check out – the Mall of Asia. It's the third-largest mall in the world by square footage, and I felt it would be a welcome respite from shopping in Palm Terrace every day.

On Friday morning I set off with JB, walking down Arlegui street to the corner where we could catch me a taxi. As I walked down this street, I could barely take it all in – there were places where the poverty absolutely takes your breath away. There was a burned down husk of a building, now just a forest of unstable pillars with the floor piled high with trash, and yet people walking through it, shoveling piles from place to place – why I don’t know. People were living on the street, sometimes in the small shops they ran there. It was a kind of squalor I have never seen in Pohnpei

On the other hand, there is color everywhere. Not merely the anthemic colors of our big chains – the Target red, the Chick-Fil-A white, the Wal-Mart blue on every corner – but whatever wild and mismatching colors the owners of this pedicab, or that soda stand, decided to brighten up the street with. Everything is hand-painted and no one takes themselves too seriously. In a way, its incredibly beautiful.

The streets are crammed with pedicabs (sidecars attached to small motorbikes or bicycles) and jeepneys (converted WWII-era jeeps, painted wild colors and carrying a dozen or two people in each). They jostle past each other, moving in and out of lanes and driving at seemingly insane speeds, but the drivers someone avoid each other, as though communicating telepathically – riding in a cab here will take ten years off of your life.

Eventually, JB managed to hail a cab for me, and I sped off for the MOA. When I got out of the cab and paid the driver his 100 pesos ($2), I was confronted with the most incredibly beautiful sign I have ever seen: “Hypermarket”. Imagine a Super Wal-Mart on steroids, only so colorful that it is actually pleasant to walk around it – then imagine how it must feel to do that after five months of shopping in the same poorly stocked, tiny supermarket and you’ll get the idea.

The mall itself is absolutely insane – several hundred stores, the hypermarket, an IMAX theatre along with a regular eight-screen cinema, a science discovery center, and a giant ice-skating rink. I spent the whole day there, playing in the arcades, eating in the food courts, watching The Day the Earth Stood Still in the largest movie theatre I have ever been in – honestly, I did very little shopping. Most of my Christmas presents were bought in Pohnpei, but I did manage to walk away from the MOA with a package of cigars that the salesperson said were the best in the Philippines.

The next day, I decided to visit the Intramuros, a historical district in Manila. The word means literally “between the walls” – the walls in question were constructed by the Spanish during the colonial period, at the site of an old Muslim trading post. The same walls housed MacArthur’s administration building, and the region inside them was designated a historical district and restorations were begun under Ferdinand Marcos.

Fortunately, the Intramuros is not far from the apartment I am staying at, so I decided to walk there. The walk took me over a canal, brimming with garbage (mostly old bleach bottles) and lined with tiny slum tenements… I could see children swimming in the fetid water, less than a kilometer from Malacañang palace, the residence of the president of the Philippines.

After I crossed the Ayala bridge and hung a right on Natividad Almeda-Lopez, I found myself once again in the other Manila as I passed yet another SM mega-mall. After passing the Bonifacio memorial, I found myself near the entrance to the Intramuros district. I grabbed a passing pedicab and had the driver take me around the perimeter until we came to Fort Santiago.

From there, I shared a tour of the historical district with a couple from Canada – we split the cost of a thousand pesos. Our tour guide, George, was hilarious and very thorough. The tour wound through the Intramuros on a horse-drawn carriage, and eventually ended back at Fort Santiago, where we walked through a museum dedicated to one of the heroes of Phillipine independence, Dr. Jose Rizal.

After my tour, I headed south through the Intramuros to the adjacent park named after Dr. Rizal. I found a free concert set up there, with thousands of people standing about watching. All of sudden, two Phillipino women walked up and began asking me questions about my tattoos. Soon we were all heading down to the Baywalk, where I captured the amazing picture of the sunset above.

While we waited on the Baywalk, these women were soon joined by a group of their friends. It was one of their birthdays, and they were planning to celebrate with some karaoke and disco. We all piled into a Jeepney (my first ride) and headed to the karaoke place, but it was closed, and so we headed to the birthday-girl's house for a traditional Phillipino dinner her mom had prepared. At some point, a 40-oz bottle of San Miguel was brought out and shared, and then another.

Afterwards, we went out to the disco, but I don't really remember much about it. I was so exhausted at this point that I kept nodding off mid-conversation. Finally, one of the guys carried me out of the club and hailed me a taxi. I would think they had drugged me, but none of my cash was missing... it was probably just delayed jet-lag.

The next day I took it easy - the biggest event was my breakfast with JC and JR's girlfriend, at this place called Heaven n' Eggs. I stayed around the apartment most of the day watching my House DVDs. At some point I hit the bootleg DVD market down the street – I got two seasons of Prison Break on a single disc, for 50 pesos (about $1), along with a lot of other similar bargains. Did you know Quantum of Solace is already out on DVD? ;)

On Monday I returned to the Mall of Asia to mail my christmas presents home – the process ended up taking me forever! I got them wrapped in one shop, bought cardboard boxes to mail them in, then I had to go online to get some addresses and finally hit an ATM for the cash to send them. It ended up taking a few hours, and by the time I was done I just headed home to watch more bootleg DVDs.

The next day, I visited the Manila Ocean Park – it definitely wasn't worth the 500 pesos I paid to get in, but it was still pretty cool. The most interesting part was the Fish Spa, where you put your feet in a pool with little reef fish that come and eat the dead skin off them – it tickles like you wouldn't believe. At the end, I got a "glass bottom boat" ride across the giant tank I had walked through earlier in a tunnel. I went through the whole place in an hour and a half.

After the Ocean Park, I hailed a taxi to the Manila Zoo. This was way cheaper - only 40 pesos to get in, and considerably more worth the price. They didn't have many animals, but it is just a tiny urban zoo, and they did have a tiger. Check out the video.

The next day, I chilled out at the apartment again to watch some bootleg DVDs - I'm bringing home like a dozen. Right now I'm staying in the Hyatt downtown - I checked in last night to give myself a little break from the tiny apartment in Quiapo. I'm leaving for the provinces soon, so I'll probably be out of touch until after Christmas. Anyway, that's all for now – enjoy this video of my last Jeepney ride about town, and have a happy holidays if I don't post before then! :)

Welcome to Manila!!!

Tagalog Word of the Day: Malagayang Pasko! = "Merry Christmas!"

Well, my first semester is finally over!

The last few weeks have been completely insane – I taught all day during the week and graded all weekend. I didn’t visit the Doses at all, or see any new Pohnpei sights… I need this break more than I’ve ever needed a break in my life! Three whole weeks without any responsibilities at all – I need a vacation from my vacation. :)

My classes ended fairly well – I ended up failing about a third of my students, but I can confidently say that everyone who got an F worked very hard to earn it. I collected some 70 grades for every student, so nobody can complain that a bad score on one or two tests drove their average down. Most of those Fs are students who only came to class two or three days a week (we meet for five), and when they did come to class they spent most of it chatting with their friends or sleeping.

On the other hand, I did give four or five students in every class an A, and I can confidently say that these were equally well deserved. Although some of these students were obviously very skilled in math, and may have been taking a course below their level, there were also a bunch who obviously worked very hard and spent a lot of time studying and improving themselves. They will definitely succeed in their next class.

I have already begun putting together my schedule and syllabus for MS 95 next semester – one of the mistakes I made last semester was not doing enough long-term planning, so that I was only really aware of what I planned to talk about the next week. I want to do a lot more activities and fewer lectures with my COM students, like I’ve been doing with my TSP students. Also, I’m giving fewer assignments so I won’t be swamped with grading – I only plan to give my MS 100 section four monthly tests, and maybe a short quiz once a week.

As for TSP, that has been going very well, although it has been completely draining me of energy. The timing of the class really sucks – most of the time, I have just enough time after teaching my COM classes to rest and recuperate, and then I have to rush off to TSP, after which I’m too exhausted to do anything else. If it were right after my regular classes (like it is for Tanja) I would probably be able to do more work during the week, and spend my weekends having fun.

I have made a real connection with my TSP students that has evaded me at COM… because I don’t feel under any pressure to cover a set amount of material, I take as much time as they need and make myself more open to questions. The students really like me, and we usually spend some time before class chatting, so I’ve gotten to know them better on a personal level. On my birthday, they sang to me, and everyone was disappointed when I told them last night that I was leaving for Christmas in Manila.

So, besides classes, what else has been going on? Let me see… it’s been a while since I posted anything here.

I was the Joker, à la Heath Ledger, for Halloween. I died my hair green with Kool-Aid and food coloring – it worked better than you might think (my hair is still a little green actually), although I had to spend a night with my head burning and wrapped in Saran Wrap, wondering if all my hair was going to fall out in the morning. I also got a makeup kit from Yoshie, and I made sure to put it all on before my first class that day. My students got a kick out of it (although most of them didn’t know who I was supposed to be), and fortunately I was just proctoring a test that day – I never could have taught in that get-up.


(By the way, The Dark Knight is officially my favorite movie this year, although there were some parts I didn’t like – namely, those with Christian Bale in them. What was that guy doing in a movie about the Joker anyway? Two words, Christopher Nolan… “more Joker”! Oh, and make a sequel to Memento… or would that be a prequel?)

Pohnpeians do Halloween in style – they’re not exactly big on elaborate costumes (I saw a few kids with just a towel on their head), but the kids love the free candy aspect. As soon as it got dark, they come out in groups of a dozen or so – strolling along the main road without adults (except for the really little ones), gleefully oblivious to the threat of oncoming cars, neighborhood pedophiles and satanists who put razor blades in Hershey’s bars. It’s the kind of trick or treating nobody does in America anymore, and it ran on late – I still saw big groups knocking on doors at ten o’clock.

A few days later, I had my 22nd birthday. Mom got me a giftcard from Amazon, and I bought a bunch of the DVDs on my wishlist. Dad got me the iPod speakers I wanted, much to the annoyance of my poor roommate – now I can watch shoot-em-ups and really feel the walls explode. The day of, I wanted to go to Joy and have myself a Pohnpei Pepper Steak (which is, yes, as good as it sounds) – but I slipped and fell in some mud walking home from TSP, and so I opted against it and went the next day.

Because of the international date line, my birthday here was actually the same day as the election back home. They announced the results in the afternoon (for us), and a group of volunteers met up at Oceanview Café to watch the news coverage. When I walked in, they were already there, beaming from ear to ear. Erin told me she had two great birthday presents for me – Obama won, and Florida went blue. I wonder what the return policy is on those gifts, in case I don’t like them…?

Despite the fact that I think his election is to politics what the Atkins diet is to nutrition (a sexy, celebrity-endorsed quick fix with no real evidence of its efficacy), I wish Barry the best of luck – I hope he is everything the American people hope he will be. All of the other volunteers (raving liberals to a man) seemed excited and relieved, but I told them the results were never really in doubt for me, and shouldn’t have been in doubt for anyone remotely familiar with our love affair with tall, dark and handsome politicians – for me, the interesting part will be the cabinet picks and the first hundred days. I hear he’s thinking about Hillary for state… if he really goes with her, I take back everything I just said.

Personally, I predict that Michele Obama turns out to be an inspiring first lady, the true moral and intellectual center of her husband’s efforts. She will take an active role in the administration, and be constantly derided for it with accusations of her being “co-president” and not spending enough time baking cookies for her children. Barack will have a series of unimportant affairs which will be blown way out of proportion by the opposition, but his charm will still be impossible to overcome, and Obama-Biden will defeat Palin-Keyes to earn their second term in 2012. After they leave office in 2016, Michele will enjoy a successful career as the junior senator from her home state of Nevada.

Meanwhile, the tremendous success of the Obama administration will have left the world a more peaceful and prosperous place, so Americans will naturally stop giving a hoot about politics and elect a Bush again – let’s say Jeb this time, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of Neil. Terrorists will attack us again, and Michele will naturally bow to the political reality of the public’s irrational fears and vote to invade Iran. The war will turn out to be a great disaster, and she will soon begin to speak out against it. Eventually, she will run for president in 2024, when her previous sixteen years of moral but practical opposition will be spun to make her look like a “beltway insider”. She will put up a good fight, but eventually be defeated in the primaries by… Chelsea Clinton.

Which will make my 38th birthday rock.

A few weeks later, the Pohnpei rotary club held a trivia night at the PCR Hotel. I have never seen so many people at a trivia night – there were at least a hundred or so, broken into six-person teams. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear about it until the actual night, so I got stuck with people who didn’t care much about the trivia, and were more interested in buying raffle tickets. We came in around tenth place, but we still won a bottle of wine each. The ambassador from Australia was sitting behind us, and her team won first place – a hundred bucks each, but they donated it back.

Nic (from Kitti) and I have started an unofficial Friday movie night. We usually watch action movies (like Max Payne and Hitman) or nerdy movies (The Neverending Story and Zombie Strippers), because we’re probably the only two people in the group who would enjoy them. Often, this is the only socializing I do during the week, and I’ve come to really look forward to hanging out.

So, that was the last couple of weeks… yesterday, I was finally finished with all of my grading, and just in time to jet off to Manila. I arrived at the Pohnpei airport early, so I only had to wait half an hour or so to have my bags inspected – they do that to every checked back, by hand. Of course, PNI only has one gate… there is an “Arrivals” area, which I’ve been to a couple of times, and a “Departures” area, which I had never seen. Fortunately, it was air-conditioned.

When we flew into Hawaii on our way here in July, I was seated in the exact middle of a 747, so I didn’t get to see any of the island from the air. On all of the other island landings or takeoffs, it was already too dark. So you can imagine how excited I was to get a window seat on all my flights to Manila, since the flight left on a sunny day in the afternoon.

The first leg was a 40-minute island-hop to Chuuk – I got some beautiful footage of Pohnpei from the air on takeoff, and more footage of Chuuk when we landed. Chuuk itself is just a couple of small islands scattered through a gigantic lagoon, and you really got a sense for the size of the island that must once have been there when we flew over the reef that originally grew up along its shore. In a few million years, all of its remnants will have eroded away, and only an atoll will remain.

After that came a 90-minute flight to Guam, which didn’t have nearly as spectacular a view from the air, despite being a positively gigantic island. Partly, this was because it was cloudly, but mostly Guam itself is just kind of ugly. There’s a lot of deforestation that is evident from the air, and most of the land area is urbanized. They have the world’s largest K-Mart there.

When we landed, I had the surreal experience of being back on American soil again. After getting off the plane, we all had to go through immigration… I handed my passport to the Chamorro there, and I was home! Then we had to go through TSA screening again – apparently they didn’t trust the thoroughness of the Pohnpei screeners, who neither made me take off my shoes, nor randomly searched my backpack to swipe my external hard-drive and camcorder for bomb chemicals. God bless America.

When I turned the bend after TSA, I was greeted by the most awesome sight known to man, or at least to a man who has been on Pohnpei for four months... a real, honest to god, Burger King. I made a quick decision on that for dinner (beating the close second of Domino’s) and ordered the largest size of value meal that I could get. I swear I started humming The Star-Spangled Banner while they were nuking my nuggets. As the grease and salt and sugar sunk to the bottom of my stomach like a rock, I began to cry… partly from the indigestion, but mostly from the patriotism.

Then it was time for the flight to Manila, which was about 3.5 hours. We landed at 9:40 local time, on schedule, and I deplaned to find myself in the largest and best-designed airport I have ever seen. The walk from immigration, to baggage claim, to customs, to the money changer, was a straight shot of maybe 200 hundred yards. Then I headed down to the area where people come to meet you, and Evelyn’s sons immediately found me.

We piled into a taxi, and I was soon looking out on the most urban place I have been in a long time. There are neon lights everywhere, which remind me a lot of Miami. Parts of the city are extremely up-scale, with big buildings and casinos and fancy restaurants. But, unlike Miami, there are also the poorer neighborhoods with corrugated tin siding on tiny tenements and people sleeping the street.

I am staying in one of these, with Evelyn’s three sons: John Rieman (JR, 26), John Bernoulli (JB, 23) and Jose Carlo (JC, 16). The apartment itself is the smallest I have ever seen – a sort of townhouse crossed with a dorm room. There is a downstairs and upstairs, each of which is a single room with a bed on the floor filling up half of it. Not much space for four people – I am sharing a bed with two of them. But, it’s free, and I am definitely getting the real Manila experience.

The apartment is on the seventh and top floor of the building, and the hallway is actually open to the air because it has no roof… All of the apartments have windows that open out on the city and in on the building, and when it rains it actually rains right outside the front door. It has the effect of making you feel like you are on a city street, seven stories up.

This morning JB and I grabbed some breakfast at the place right outside the lobby downstairs. I got two meat dishes, neither one of which I can remember the name of, as well as a sausage for JB, each of which came with fried rice and an egg. This whole meal, along with my orange drink, cost me 101 pesos, which is about two dollars and change. Granted, it wasn’t much fancier than a microwave 7-11 burrito, but even those cost more than two bucks if you get a soda. I’m going to like it here. ☺

Anwyay, that’s the time zone I’m in now – three hours behind Pohnpei, thirteen ahead of Florida. Stay tuned!