Nuestro Perdido Eden

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Manila is not for the faint of heart. Even if you’ve been to some pretty nasty places on the face of this planet, it is hard not to feel sad and disgusted at the sight of Manila’s slums and squatter areas. I made a cursory walking tour just across the Pasig River from Intramuros, and what I saw was not a pretty sight: a hodgepodge of settlements; makeshift houses made of corrugated sheet metal, cardboard boxes, plastic awnings, and other junk scavenged from a dumpsite; naked homeless kids washing in dirty unsanitary water; people begging; people sleeping on the pavement; pickpockets; people with that hazy look of somebody high on drugs; people selling drugs. It’s pretty hard not to run into this kind of destitution when walking around Manila. It will find you. Manila is good, maybe too good, at hiding its beauty, as many Manila apologists are wont to say, but that’s because it is shrouded in poverty and neglect, and not because she is a shy lady who will reveal her beauty to you only after much effort.

Manileños will eagerly point to you places of interests that look fabulous; Luneta Park, Intramuros, the plush Makati business district, the areas around Diliman where the University of the Philippines is located, and the palatial abodes of the rich and privileged who live in gated communities with armed guards poised at the gates to beat the living crap out of the interlopers and homeless who even dreams of trespassing the inner sanctum of the people who live a life of wealth and privilege. But for the most part what you’ll find is not a city with a unique or original beauty but a third world carbon copy of a modern Western city because, apart from the modern conveniences that’s common throughout the world, not much has really changed from what Jose Rizal wrote about over a hundred years ago. Rizal’s two novels are supposedly required reading in the Philippine curricula. Each student from grade school to college has supposedly read Noli Mi Tangere and El Filibusterismo at least three or four times. These two books are supposedly studied like The Bible in the Philippines. Yet the lessons and insights provided by these two books, like The Bible, have passed through the students minds and forgotten them or have never really penetrated deeply into their consciousness in the first place. For the most part, the people of the Philippines still have that old colonial mentality that Rizal wrote about in his two famous novels, which is surprising. Or maybe not. When you make something compulsory, the tendency is to rebel against it or to totally reject it just to spite authority. Jose Rizal is just another statue to adore, another saint, someone to revere. Any deep and philosophical insight into his work, like Jesus, does not appear to have been absorbed.

Just like the statues of the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus Santo Niño are ubiquitous in the Philippines, so is the statue of Jose Rizal. Every barangay of each town in every province on each island in the Philippines will bear a statue of Jose Rizal. There will also be a Lhullier pawnshop right next to it. Piety is the rule of the land. Vanity is the most popular vice. It’s all on the surface. Most people believe in Jesus Christ almighty without question. Yet most people understand Jesus Christ’s philosophy just as much as they understood their required reading of Jose Rizal’s books in high school and college, which is to say not very much at all. But let’s not forget that the Philippines is still a third world country, thus, people's preoccupation is still on survival. Let me have some food and shelter first, and then we’ll talk about the virtues of Jose Rizal’s two novels.

Negros Occidental

I had enough of Manila after a couple of days. It’s not that I disliked Manila in particular. As a matter of fact, there were pockets of Manila that I particularly liked. Even though I didn't write about it much, I was impressed with certain parts of Quezon City, near the circle. But generally I just don't like big cities for its horrendous traffic, its smoke belching congestion, its overpopulation, and the overall pretensions of its inhabitants. I’m just a small town kid; born in a small town, raised in a small town, and just like John Cougar Mellenkamp, will probably die in a small town. Oh, those small communities . Gui-tar strummin’.

I flew out of Manila and an hour later landed into the new Bacolod Airport. I have never seen the old Bacolod Airport. Apparently this is much better than the old one. Bacolod is a dusty oily city, somewhat dilapidated, and it neither has the charm of a small town nor the sophistication, at least at first sight, of a modern metropolis. I checked into the L’Fisher hotel near downtown and walked around the town in the evening just to have a look-see and maybe find something interesting. There were tons of street vendors early in the evening/late in the afternoon. The most popular street food is the rotisserie chicken, locally known as litson manok or chicken inasal. I don’t know if inasal is an Ilongo word or a Bisayan word. Quite frankly I don’t care but the smell of barbecue chicken was appetizing, so I sat down in one of those little barbecue stalls and had me some chicken inasal, Bacolod style, with its superb special sauce, a bowl of garlic rice, and a bottle of Pale Pilsen San Miguel beer. Nothing beats a good Filipino dish with a bottle of San Miguel to wash it all down.

The native inhabitants of Negros call themselves Negrense. It’s a good thing they don’t call themselves the N-word. They are a gracious and provincial people, exactly my kind of people. They seem unpretentious and “unuppity” - if such a word exists - totally unlike the people in Manila, who fancy themselves metropolitan. Like all the towns, cities, and barangays of each province on every island in the Philippines, there’s a Lhullier pawnshop in every corner. These frogs have the monopoly on this bloodsucking business.

The next day I got on a bus, a Ceres Liner, headed for Dumaguete. There’s a Ceres Liner bus leaving for Dumaguete from Bacolod every two hours or so, but I got there early in the morning, around 8:00 AM, because I didn’t know they had buses running that route on a regular basis. It seemed at first that I was going to be the only passenger on this bus, but that was because I was there a little too early. The bus departs at 8:30 AM. Filipinos don’t show up to board until the last minute, or even later, which is typical. There were six or seven buses at the terminal waiting to depart, all headed for different destinations. There were also plenty of food vendors hanging around the terminal hawking the local delicacies; puto, bibingka, stuff like that. Don’t ever acknowledge their presence if you don’t like being pestered by these vendors, mostly kids under the age of twelve, speaking in a language that I did not understand, Ilongo. I could not understand a single word they said, but I understood what they were essentially saying; buy my puto or bibingka, very delicious, or words to that effect. The second you make eye contact they will pester you to no end. Only ten pesos they’ll say. They’ll get on the bus and show you the delicious foods they’re selling, or some boiled purple eggs perhaps, some chips, a bottle of water, and some other snacks. I spent fifty pesos on a bottle of water, a bag of bibingkas, and the boiled purple eggs, which I think are maybe duck eggs, although I’m not sure. It tasted just like your regular boiled chicken egg.

At five minutes before departure the bus starts filling up to half its capacity. The fare collector starts walking up and down the aisle, giving away slips, which are actually bus tickets with a list of destinations and the bus fare right beside it. The ticket does not become valid until you pay the fare to the fare collector, where upon receipt he will punch a hole right next to the city of your destination. Also at the bottom of the ticket are the words of gratuity: Thank You. He punches a hole right next to that too, after you pay your fare.

“Pila man ka horas ang viaje para sa Dumaguete?” I ask the conductor.

“Pibe and a hap awors,” he responded. It irritated me that he responded in English. I did not know if he understood Bisayan (Visayan, whatever) but I was fairly certain that what I just said could be understood in almost any Filipino dialect.

As the bus pulled out of the terminal and onto the busy streets of Bacolod, the sound of disco music beams out from the loudspeakers of the bus’ stereo system, the 1970s classic I Love the Nightlife by Alicia Bridges. The catchy instrumental introduction of the song alone makes you want to jump up and boogie. I was toe tapping while watching the scene of early morning Bacolod, and correlating the disco beat and sound to the movements of people and vehicles: street vendors strutting and nodding while hawking their wares Please don't talk about love tonight; motorcabs overloaded with students in clean blue and white uniforms are bumping up and down the road Please don't talk about sweeeeeeeeeet looove; jeepneys overloaded with passengers and consumer goods like sacks of rice, bananas, rattan furniture, bicycles parts, etc are zipping by with a purpose I want to go where the people dance; pedestrians going about their business, looking for action I want some, EAAAACK! Shown, I wanna Leeeeeee-iv!; and shop owners and shopkeepers opening their doors for business - I love to boooogey, on the disco whaaaaaaoaaaah. There is nothing more bizarre than the sound of vintage disco music while riding a bus in the Philippines, amidst the ramshackle of third world dilapidation, along oily and trashy roads, with this upbeat background music to comfortably numb you into surreality. Mind altering drugs could not possibly magnify the effect any higher.

The bus made its way along the coast. The islands of Guimaras and Panay to the right, and Iloilo Province, are visible across Guimaras Strait. The bus driver, who is probably Satan, drove as fast as he could, passing any slow moving jeepneys, cars, motorcabs, and trucks hauling sugarcane. We zip by overloaded jeepneys carrying sacks of rice and extra passengers on its rooftops. Thirty minutes later we arrived at the little port town of Bago, circled around the town to pick up some passengers, and then we were off again on the coastal road heading south. Guimaras strait turns into Panay Gulf on the right. Double outrigger canoes float in the distance with the fishermen casting nets. On our left the landscape changes from hilly jungle to wide flat sugarcane fields, alternating every few hundred miles or so. Another stop at some nondescript town and we are off again on the coastal road. After three hours of over speeding and overtaking slower moving vehicles, making hairpin turns on coastal roads with no guardrails, zigzagging, honking, and snaking along the narrow two-lane highway on the coast of Negros Occidental, with disco music constantly blasting in the background, we arrived in Kabankalan, another small town, for a one hour lunch break.

I had been munching on the bibingkas, chips, purple boiled eggs, and other snacks while en route on the coastal road, so I wasn’t really all that hungry when we made the one hour stop. Instead of eating lunch I walked across the street from the bus terminal to the open air market where vendors where selling all kinds of goods, sort of like a bazaar; textiles, handicrafts, jewelries, clothes, shoes, handbags, cooking pans, rugs, and anything you could think of was available, even a pet monkey. I wasn’t really interested in buying anything although I saw a black T-shirt that I found amusing; in front it bore the images of Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara, the Communist Hall of Famers.

We were off again on the highway, over speeding and overtaking other slow moving vehicles. This time there was no disco music in the background. I see new faces on board the bus. The landscape has changed from the coastal flatlands to a mountainous jungle terrain. We did not pass through any large towns, mostly small towns with one big general store where most people got their essentials, like gas, sacks of rice, and canned goods, the stuff you couldn’t buy from your local sari-sari store. Every little town has at least one big Catholic Church, a statue of Jose Rizal, and a basketball court, dirt or cement paved. The weather turns from hot and humid to cool and misty as we go higher up in elevation. After about an hour we made a stop in Mabinay, a relatively large town with a charming little plaza at the town’s center. More people are getting off. Some more people are climbing on board. The murmur of Bisayan speaking passengers becomes predominant now that we are in a Bisayan speaking province of Negros Oriental.

Negros Oriental

We continue climbing up the mountainous region of the island of Negros, in the Oriental side, on our way to Dumaguete. We reached the summit a few miles ahead. It is covered in fog, which moisten the glass windows of the bus and slickens the two-lane highway, making it slippery and dangerous. The bus driver keeps driving at full speed, ignoring the danger. More hairpin turns. My stomach rises up to my chest as the bus driver makes a hairpin turn while descending on this hilly road. It’s as hairy as a roller coaster ride in Paramount's Great America. The wide green valley down below is breathtaking, but its beauty is difficult to enjoy in this roller coaster bus ride. We zigzag and snake through the fog and rain, the bus driver undeterred by what seems to me a dangerous maneuver through a 180-degree turn and sloping down 45 degrees. Some people were starting to get sick from the combination of the hairy bus ride and the cool and wet weather of the mountains. After another hour or so we finally arrived in the coastal city of Bais. Some passengers got out to barf out their lunch on the pavement or to use the "comfort room", but there's nothing comfortable about it. However, everyone started to feel better after the thirty-minute rest stop at the Bais City bus terminal. The bus driver and the fare collector were sitting in one of the stalls of the terminal vendors, smoking menthol Salem cigarettes and drinking Pepsi, looking satisfied and perhaps enjoying themselves of the thrill ride. The road to Dumaguete became less hairy as we speeded down the coastal highway on the other side of Negros Island. The sun shines brightly upon us with just a few cumulus clouds in the sky. To our left across the sea, the southern tip of the island of Cebu is visible.

The City of Gentle People

I am at the waterfront in Dumaguete City, “the City of Gentle People with No Traffic Lights”. Actually, I added the “No Traffic Lights” bit; it’s not really part of their motto. Dumaguete is a bustling little port city in the southeast corner of the island of Negros. The streets are chock full of passenger vehicles; motorcabs, minibuses about the size of a Mini Cooper with an extended bed for passenger seating (this is a pretty poor description, it doesn't do the vehicle justice), Ceres Liner buses, jeepneys, mopeds, bicycles and pedestrians are all going about in every direction and traversing in a somewhat organized chaos. Whenever there’s room to go these little sonovaguns go. Jaywalking is the norm. Whenever there’s a tiny bit of space to jaywalk people jaywalk. That’s what everybody does and when in Dumaguete, you do as the gentle peoples do.

Dumaguete is probably my favorite city in the Philippines although my opinion doesn’t really mean much because I have only been to a handful of cities here. Furthermore I have tried to avoid the tourist destinations but admittedly I have been trapped into a few. I had been warned that Manila is not for the faint of heart but inevitably, I had to brave Manila, take my licks, and write about them just like all the other critically acclaimed and award winning travel writers who came before me, like Samuel Langhorne Clemens. It’s like solving Dirac’s Equation, even for the most trivial case. Nobody likes doing it but everyone has to do it at least once in order to get through graduate school. I have been to Cebu and quite frankly I wasn’t too impressed of what I saw. More chaotic than it needs to be. I have been to Maasin City and was surprised to find it quite a bit alluring. I was impressed of its sleepiness and the unassuming liveliness of the town and its people. A cool breeze was always blowing in from the seaside to the mountains in the afternoon to cool off the mid-afternoon heat, which can be brutal in these parts of the world. You can always find a neat little restaurant or a bar in the oceanfront and catch the onshore breeze to cool you off in the afternoon with a bottle of San Miguel in your hand.

Now I am here in Dumaguete, at the waterfront, sitting in one of those cement block park benches and feeling the cool onshore breeze blowing in while writing this very passage that you see write in front of you. There’s a relatively wide bayside walking path where strollers and street vendors can walk side by side to enjoy the same cool refreshing breeze I’m soaking in. The choppy water bounces off the seawall of the waterfront and sprinkles a bit of ocean spray in the air, which compounds the coolness of the sea breeze. The Sun is still high up in the sky, a few hours away from dipping down on the west side of the horizon, and the Sun’s rays combined with a few cumulus clouds that forms a shade above the choppy ocean causes it to sparkle like diamonds in the wide open sea. The scenery here at this very moment is spectacular! To the right is the island of Siquijor, land of witches and faith healers. To the left is the southern part of the elongated island of Cebu.

Behind the sea walled baywalk is a 20-yard wide grass field that stretches along the length of the waterfront and is lined with Acacia trees along that stretch. The trunks of the Acacia trees are wrapped around with plastic transparent tubing with tiny, multicolored light bulbs inside such that at night, when the bulbs are lit up, they look like Christmas trees . Adjacent to this patch of green grass and Acacia trees is Rizal Boulevard, a major thoroughfare, although the traffic here is not as heavy as the other boulevard, Perdices, that runs along the same length a couple of blocks inland towards center of town. Facing the ocean across the street from the waterfront on Rizal Boulevard are your usual tourist traps; hotels, restaurants, bars, banks and ATMs, boutiques, specialty shops, internet cafés, fast food chains, dive shops, more bars, more hotels, and of course, as you will see throughout this wonderful country called the Philippines, a Cebuana Lhuillier pawnshop.

I am staying at the Bethel Guesthouse on the Boulevard. It is the only hotel in the whole wide world where smoking and drinking is not allowed. You step into the lobby and there’s a great big sign on the wall to greet you that says

WELCOME: THIS IS A NONSMOKING AND NO ALCOHOL HOTEL.

This is not a problem for me because I don’t smoke and don’t mind doing my drinking somewhere else. This is not why I chose this hotel however. I picked it based simply on the listing provided by the Philippines guidebook I bought in Manila. This guidebook is not as extensive as the Lonely Planet: The Philippines guidebook but in many ways it’s actually better because it contains more details with more accurate city maps of several cities that the Lonely Planet doesn’t even bother to cover.

For its price, which is 850 pesos for a deluxe room per night (about $22 per night), the quality of the room is pretty good although the accommodation is somewhat Spartan. It’s very clean and sanitized, with good water pressure in the shower head, the part I liked the most because I enjoy a nice endless heavy stream of water above me when taking a shower.

God is everywhere in this hotel. There are plenty of God books for sale in the lobby. They are not the critical thinking type of God books that’s a lot more fun to read but the faith based guilt filled inspirational thinking type of God books written by men of God; reverends, theologians, and people of their ilk. Right this very moment there is a huge God convention going on in this hotel. In the rooms, aside from the customary bible that’s part of every hotel room in the western world (or at least in the states), there are pamphlets about God and Christianity, and the arts displayed on the wall are about good clean wholesome living, very sanitized, very puritan, something that God himself would presumably approve. This is the reason why this hotel, for all its niceties, its cleanliness and comfortness, is nonsmoking and non liquor drinking. The people of God won’t have any of it.

The hotel is administered and run by the people of God. I’m not sure if it’s Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist or whatnot but one thing for sure; it ain’t the Catholic people of God who runs this place. It’s the Protestants and it’s also very American. This place has America written all over it. From the guests (American God people are everywhere), to its puritanical godlike atmosphere, from the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam, this place reeks of “God Bless America”. This is why this place feels so soothing and comforting to me. This is not why I came to the Philippines however, to be soothed and comforted. No! I came to the Philippines because there is something about this place that I need to figure out, whatever it is. There is so much of me that is part of this place, too much really, for one lifetime to explore. Even if I spent the rest of my life living and searching in the Philippines I still wouldn’t figure it (the Philippines) or myself out. It’s simply too complex. Both of us are too complex so the best I could do is start from the top and dig down as deep as I can until I’ve dug a hole deep enough to bury myself into.

None of us will ever accomplish everything we ever wanted to do so we prioritize and leave a lot of things unfinished. The surface is of course where you start because it’s the easiest place to explore. You just look around, look at the people around you, look at how they live, stuff like that, and you form an opinion. Then you get a little bit involved with their lives, live close to them, and you learn a little more. Then you get a lot more involved and interact more closely, and you learn enough to lose your sanity.

Back to writing about Dumaguete, the city of gentle people. I don’t know its history. Normally it wouldn’t matter to me. This is a normal occasion, which means that quite frankly I’d rather not write about it because there are other more capable and well informed writers that could do a heckuvalot better job writing about the history of the city of gentle people than I do, so I’ll just leave it up to them to do that.

I took a walk around town early this morning to get a better feel for the place. A couple of blocks from the Bethel Guesthouse is Quezon Park, a well shaded square block full of Acacia trees and gardens with a Rizal monument in the middle. Across the park is an old Catholic Church, which is a common sight in many Philippine towns and cities, its only distinguishing character being that there’s a Belfry just off to its right side. I am not the first to write about these things. Lots of people, generations ago, have beaten me to it. History is great reading but writing about history can be real agonizing. This is why I’ll never write about history other than what I’m about to write right here. This will be just a brief historical account of the American experience in the Philippines right after they took possession of the land after they defeated the Spanish in the Spanish-American War.

The Protestants from the United States of America came to this area with one thing in mind: to Christianize the savages of the Philippines. They were three hundred and fifty years too late. They’ve already been catholicized. Fine, said the Americans. That’s the wrong kind of Christianization anyway so it doesn’t affect our plans. We want to blanket the Philippine population with the right religion. Protestanism. Puritanism. So the Church of Christs, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, and even the Church of Christ of the Ladder Day Saints (the Mormons), quickly setup shop and established a God business in the American model. Their primary intention was to make Filipinos think like Americans, to be their “Little Brown Brothers”. They didn’t succeed. Filipinos still think like Filipinos, the type of thinking that the Spanish instilled in them for three hundred and fifty years. That’s one thing about the Spanish. They were good at dehumanizing people, making them feel like dirt, and telling them that that’s their fate in this universe and that they are going to live a long and miserable life until the day they die and once you die, if you had devoted your whole miserable existence to God, then you may enter the kingdom of God and live happily ever after. This was how the Friars controlled the natives. They also abused their powers of authority. At first the natives of this archipelago they called La Islas Filipinas didn’t buy it. They rebelled. Several times. So the Spanish used force and beat them to death until the Indios finally kneeled down and obeyed God, and the Spanish kept them down and obeying for three hundred and fifty years such that it became part of their psyche. To this day the Indios, now called Filipinos, still has it as part of their collective consciousness that anything white (i.e., of Spanish or European origin) is better than the dark skinned Indios that they are. They think this because it was programmed onto them for three hundred and fifty years by the Spaniards.

The Americans weren’t very successful in making the Filipinos change to worshiping the right kind of Christian God either. The Protestant God. There are 85 million people who inhabit the islands of the Philippines. About 68 million are still Catholics. Tim Tebow, the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner, an award given to the supposedly best college football player in the world, was born in the Philippines. His father Bob was, and still is, a missionary who setup shop in the Philippines back in the 80s. His wife was pregnant with Tim while on location to spread the gospel and Protestanize the Filipinos. As Tim’s mom told everyone who interviewed her as he was gaining a lot of popularity and notoriety in the run for the Heisman Trophy, she was suffering some sort of malady under her pregnancy of Tim and the doctors recommended aborting the pregnancy for health reasons. She refused of course. Now, I normally don’t like to get into a debate about the pros and cons of abortion. As far as I’m concerned there are times when it’s appropriate and there are times when it is not. In this case I would’ve agreed that if it’s a matter of life and death, you should do what’s best for your life because one less dead people is better than two. But being fundamentalist Christians that the Tebow family is, they refused aborting the pregnancy, and a good thing they did otherwise there would be no Tim Tebow, 2007 Heisman Trophy winner.

Now, I went into this whole digression about the Tebow family to make a point, and not about abortion. I could care less about abortion. The point I’m trying to make is conversion from the Catholic faith to Protestanism. Tim Tebow’s dad, Bob Tebow, runs a foundation that provides services to Christianize the peoples of the Philippines. In its website, bteo.org, the foundation claims that 65 million Filipinos have never heard the message of God. Again, there are 85 million people in the Philippines. 68 million are Catholics. So what exactly does Bob Tebow mean? Does he mean that 65 million have never heard the message of God because only 3 million are smart enough to read and understand The Bible and the rest are idiots? Hopefully that’s not what Bob Tebow meant because if it is there will be a barrage of protests from Filipinos in America. If an innocuous comment from Desperate Housewives can rankle up the Filipinos, a highly denigrating comment that I’ve just suggested will surely fire up the troops. So no, I don’t think Bob Tebow meant that Filipinos are idiots and can’t understand what’s written in The Bible. What he probably meant was - and I could be wrong, I’m just simply guessing here - that out of the 85 million Filipinos only 3 million have been Christianized in the “proper” way while the rest have not been converted yet. Well, what about those 350 years spent in the convent? Either Bob Tebow is ignorant of that fact, which is unlikely considering that he spent a great deal of time as a missionary in the Philippines, or he simply thinks that Catholicism is the wrong kind of religion and people who belong to that denomination should not be considered Christians.

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While I’m writing this passage a bride and groom, recently married couple, is having their picture taken behind me with the Bethel Guesthouse in the background. Outside of the Boulevard there are a lot more interesting places to see in Dumaguete. There are quite a few universities in this town. The oldest is Silliman University, founded in 1901 by American missionaries. If there’s a place in the Philippines where the Americans relatively succeeded in converting the Filipinos into their brand of Christianism - Protestanism - it is here in Dumaguete. The other colleges in town are St. Paul University and Negros Oriental State University. I say the Americans were relatively successful in Dumaguete because the place is still overwhelmingly Catholic. The Americans did not succeed into making Filipinos think like Americans. They only succeeded in making Filipinos wish to immigrate to the United States of America, and they’ve been immigrating ever since the Americans introduced America to the Philippines. It’s not that the Filipinos don’t love their country. They do, very much so. But life in these parts of the world is difficult because of the lack of opportunities for the masses. The government is inefficient if not corrupt, the infrastructure that facilitates commerce is poor, and the people have a predisposition to work against one another for the common good. Everyone who is or seems to be in a position to act in the best interest and invest into the system only want to profit on the backs of the poor. Now a gazillion people are working overseas as contract workers and become the cash cow for the economy.

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Two somewhat older Filipina chicks, dressed in tight jeans and black halter-tops, gets approached by a Westerner who sounds like he is French. These two ladies are dressed to kill, like they were looking for action, and everyone who passes by them stares, so naturally they’re gonna get approached. Only Westerners though have the audacity to actually walk up to women and start talking. Filipinos aren't that bold. They are a little more oblique and subtle, sometimes clumsy, in their approach to women. The French guy gives the two women his cell phone number. The girls, who look like they are in their mid-thirties, giggle. The French guy asks them for their cell phone numbers. The two girls lied, saying they left their cell phones at home. I know that’s a lie because no Filipino/Filipina ever leaves their house without their cell phone. I think most of them even go to bed with their cell phone and all of them are text messaging in their dreams, I’m sure!

The Philippines leads the universe in text messaging. Seeing a twelve-year-old Filipina text messaging is a sight to behold. No one text messages faster than a Filipina teenager. If they ever hold a text-messaging contest a twelve-year-old Filipina kid would win easily, especially if the text message to be sent is “Nina’s boyfriend Rudy has an eye for you Cecilia”! The message would be sent in short hand of course, like instead of boyfriend it would be spelled “bF” and such, such as, like Miss Teen South Carolina, as such. Juicy gossip like that will be text messaged in the Philippines faster than the speed of light.

The French guy, I don’t think, believed the lie, but Frenchmen are clever, especially when it comes to women. He gave one of the girls his cell phone and said, “Why don’t you text yourself using my phone”. The two girls giggled even more. The sound of their giggling indicated to me a delightful feeling of embarrassment when caught in a lie, like a girl who runs but is thrilled when the boy finally catches her. Unfortunately, after the Frenchman got what he wanted he moved on. I’m sure he will track these ladies later on. I only wished he would stay a little longer and kept the flirting and chasing going with these two girls because they were right in front of me and me pretending not to notice, completely oblivious to what was happening right in front of me, like I was lost in my own little world. I didn’t even look up. I just kept my head down on my notebook and my hands writing frantically to capture the moment. Little did these people know that I was writing about them! This is the kind of material that terribly amuses me, the awkwardness in human interaction, except there was nothing awkward about. This is infatuation at its finest. It certainly isn’t love. It is much, much, much more tangible and real than love, it's instant gratification, a primordial instinct that we were born with but yet spend a lifetime trying to suppress, but how can you live when you suppress something that just wants to burst out of your very existence and cry freedom to the top of your lungs! The answer is that you cannot, and therefore you either suffer or be clever, like that Frenchman that I, and you, have just witnessed.

Hayahay and Lab-as

Later in the evening I spent most of the night at the Hayahay Restaurant, about a five minute motorcab ride from the Boulevard. Hayahay means easy life or laidback in Bisayan. This is now my favorite restaurant in the whole wide world. I am sitting in an open-air table in the balcony. Down below live Reggae music is being played by a local band from Silliman University. A cool night breeze is blowing in from the bay. The white water from the choppy ocean is visible in the dark night. Hayahay is a fairly local establishment. Most of the patrons are local, mostly university folks, although I noticed quite a few foreigners. Most of them are also associated with Silliman University, as the bartender told me. You wont see too many tourists around here. The tourists are usually out on the Boulevard in one of those tacky love you long time clubs.

I am savoring a kinilaw dish made of Tanguige, and a bottle of San Miguel. I’m not sure what type of fish that is. Kinilaw is raw fish marinated in vinegar, chilies, lemon, ginger, garlic and onions, like ceviche with a unique Filipino touch. I would not attempt of making this at home, I'll just ruin it. I was mainly sampling the items on the appetizer menu because I did not feel like eating a full course meal. Later I ordered some Sisig, drank more beer, and ordered some Tanduay Rhum on the rocks while eating some the appetizers. The band kept playing more Reggae music down below. There was a guest performer, a young Haole guy from Virginia or some place like that on the East Coast of the US, supposedly a Peace Corp volunteer. He was jamming with the Silliman Univerity students. The local chicks were digging him immensely. More and more young girls, college student types, were showing up to check out the live music. The bartender told me that this place really gets rocking on Fridays and Saturdays, where students, professors, and local dignitaries like to hang out. Right next door is Lab-as, a seafood restaurant owned by the same proprietor of Hayahay. Lab-as means fresh in Bisayan. It is also very popular with locals. The restaurant and bar got rolling right around eleven in the evening, and got even more lively as the night wore on. I hope this restaurant stays this way; laid back, unpretentious, local, great menu, and most important of all, great people to hangout with. I surely will be back sometime in the future. Perhaps I should make Dumaguete my future retirement home.

Nuestro Perdido Eden

It is now Sunday at two in the afternoon. I am inside the waiting lounge in the Port of Dumaguete, waiting for a ferry to Cebu. The place is filled up to its capacity with four hundred something people. Filipino families carrying tons of luggage, kids crying, teenagers and adults watching television, and a handful of Europeans and Americans, are waiting here as well at the departing lounge. By now I am accustomed to the Philippine Port security routine. Metal detectors, dogs sniffing for contraband and weapons of mass destruction, rent-a-cops with guns in holster pockets, creased uniforms and everything that signifies the occupation of a constabulary. Amidst all this chaos and cacophony a tall European chick, about at least six-feet-two, wearing a light tropical dress and a wide brimmed straw hat with a flowery bandanna, lugging a huge backpack over her shoulder, walks in inconspicuously with her traveling partner, a guy four inches shorter than her. Nobody else notices her but me and a bald, middle-aged European guy sitting next to me.

“That is one tall chick”, the bald guy exclaimed. He sounded British or something ridiculous like that.

“No doubt” I replied.

It’s hard to be inconspicuous if you’re a tall Caucasian lady traveling in the Philippines but somehow she slithered in through the crowd without being noticed by anyone but the baldy from the UK and me. Upon closer look and especially when she turned around I understood why. Not only is she unusually tall, she is also pedestrian looking, or more appropriately, homely looking. Not necessarily ugly, just unattractive, the kind where her height certainly doesn’t help because most men prefer women shorter than them except in cases where the woman looks like Cheryl Tiegs, in which case height doesn’t matter. The tall girl and her midget boyfriend dropped their backpacks and sat right down on the plastic chairs in the departing lounge, looking tired, bored, and annoyed, staring blankly at the silly Philippine television show that’s playing on the tube, and not understanding any of it because of the language barrier.

Philippine television shows are annoying. Much of it is ridiculously silly. The format is usually like so; teenagers singing and dancing the latest fashionable routines borrowed from American television shows and fit only for the enjoyment of adolescent kids below the age of twelve. The variety is clearly intended for the teenybopper demographic. But the most surprising thing about these silly shows is that, not only is it being watched and enjoyed by the teenybopper Filipinos and Filipinas, but also by the majority of the adult population in the Philippines. The mimicry of everything superficially American is something that Filipinos tend to be very good at. Filipinos and Filipinas are a talented lot when it comes to singing and dancing. They can imitate the voices of the famous Rock n’ Roll singers in the world with only a very subtle hint of an accent even though they clearly have one when they speak. They can imitate the moonwalk moves of Michael Jackson and the disco routines of John Travolta. As a matter of fact John Travolta is still a very famous figure in the Philippines even though he probably can’t dance anymore. In the Philippines John Travolta is still the disco king of the universe.

It is now two fifteen in the afternoon. My ferry is scheduled to depart in thirty minutes. So I sit and wait here in the departing lounge with four hundred something Filipinos and nine or ten foreigners, staring at the silly show on the tube, the heat and humidity exacerbating my restlessness and irritability. Now the television is showing a couple of teen idol types singing a duet. I have never seen anything so hokey in my entire life. This is silliness at its supreme worst. The television cameras span to the crowd of young Filipina girls just eating up all this hokiness, screaming their lungs out and fainting at the sight of these two teen idols regardless of the quality of their singing. As a matter of fact these two cheeseburgers have no talent at all whatsoever, but they look good on television. One of the teeny cheeseburgers is a half American/half Filipino looking kid with soft, almost gayish, features and the talent of a screaming monkey. The other half of the terrible duo is a full-blooded Filipino, also gayishly handsome, and just about as talented as the other. There are plenty of Filipinos who are talented and can sing much, much, much better than these two cheeseburgers. Their only problem is that they aren’t as good looking so naturally they don’t get featured on television.

---

Photos

Luneta Park
The esplanade along Roxas with the iconic carbao and Bulova clock

Kid at the park
The daughter of a sari-sari store owner in Luneta

Jose Rizal Statue
Guarded at all times

Lapu-Lapu
Me killed Magellan Ha Ha Ha

Downtown Bacolod
Typical Philippine scene

Life on the highway
Bus ride from Bacolod to Dumaguete

Lunch Stop
Ceres Liner bus at rest in Kabankalan

Downtown Kabankalan
Halfway between Bacolod and Dumaguete

Mabinay Plaza
Up in the mountains of Negros Oriental

Mabinay Bus Terminal
A brief stop at the terminal in Mabinay

Fog and rain
Up in the hills of Negros Oriental

Dumaguete waterfront
The waterfront early in the morning at lowtide

Rizal Boulevard
A major thoroughfare in Dumaguete

Comments

[Lizard_liz]

Happy new year !
Superb writing , I enjoyed it .Happy new year !

[anonymous]

Cool writing!!!!!!

[home security]

home security
I enjoyed your blog. It’s easy to read, the content is good, and you’re an educated writer unlike most of the blogs I come across when searching on this topic. I will check back in the future and see if you have more articles. Thanks for posting this, I appreciate the information and the effort you put into your site. Home Security

[anonymous]

Confusion
The country itself has a beauty beyond compare. Its natural resources, its ocean, and its mountains are epitomy of innocens, and irs citizens are very religious and proud. It is true that a country is not a country without its citizens, but in the case of the Philippines, it's better off without its citizens who don't care about the country but only themselves.

[phaedrus]

Thanks for the comment
I'll be releasing a new book soon based on my travels int he Philippines. Be sure to check it out. The Editor is still deciding on the title. If it was up to me it would be Nuestro Perdido Eden.