Bloody Knees

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It seems that my internal clock has no regard for the state I am in when I go to sleep. A few evenings ago my uncle Eddie took me and my cousin Chris to my second cousins' (I'm not good with family terminology. They're basically my mom's and my uncle's cousins) to get his van fixed. I knew we were going to see my cousins, but what I was unaware of was the copious amounts of alcohol that was going to be consumed. As it always is whenever I get together with a group of people here in the Philippines, my naivete in the native language is taken advantage of as they teach me phrases that are rather inappropriate. What surprised me, though, was the fact that this was coming from my auntie, who I soon discovered was not very conservatve. She told me to say this to a girl I like: "Malaki ang dede mo; gusto ko hawakan!" I knew immediately that is was nothing innocent, and as soon as I heard the second part of the phrase I knew the meaning. It means: "Your breasts are big; I want to hold them." We had a good laugh over it, and then I proceeded to get drunk.

I get talkative when I get drunk (I don't know who doesn't) so I was speaking with my cousin a lot because he understand English the most. Him and his siblings are the only ones I can really hold a conversation in English with; according to his parents sometimes I speak too quickly in English for them to understand. This fact was also brought up while I was drinking and talking to my cousin. One of my uncles made the comment "Ah, my nose is bleeding!" which is a saying in the Philippines that means they're having difficulty understanding something. I don't know if it's specifically geared toward English, but that's what it seemed like.

Wow, fuck my life. I accidentally did something and I just lost half of this blog post that I now have to retype. Fuck! How discouraging.

We started drinking rather early, I'm going to say around 2 PM, so as the afternoon progressed into the evening I was beginning to get fairly wasted. There was plenty of pulutan, which is the filipino word for "drinking munchies." There was one particular filipino delicacy that many would find disgusting or even immoral: balot. Balot are hard-boiled, aborted duck fetuses. Sounds nasty, right? But mix that shit up with vinegar and it is delicious. There was also something called crispy pata which is basically a deep-fried pork leg. I wish I could remember how tasty it was, because apparently I devoured that shit.

Oh, and now we get to the namesake of this blog post. After drunkenly urinating on a wall, when I stepped off the sidewalk and onto the street, my leg gave out from under me and smashed into the concrete, leaving a gnarled, bloody mess where my knee used to be. It would have been terrible had I not been drunk, but luckily the alcohol numbed the pain and actually made it kind of funny. I get really clumsy (and according to my uncle, not only is my body clumsy, but my mouth also is), which usually leads me to become somewhat destructive. I don't recall the car ride home, but I think I sat on my sunglasses and broke them, and as I tried to walk into my uncle's house I was stumbling and cursing each time I lost my balance (so you could imagine how much I swore). The last thing I remember was blasting the air conditioner in my room and stripping down to my underwear before passing out. The next morning I felt kind of bad because I was texting earlier in the evening with a girl I met in Cebu and told her I'd call her when I got home, but obviously it slipped my mind as I passed out at 8 PM.

The following morning my uncle and cousin and I had some laughs at my drunken state, and later in the night I went out with my cousin eat some Pho at the mall and meet up with some girls he met in Boracay. It was the first time I've actually been out into the city, and I immediately noticed many differences between Metro Manila and the GTA. While my hometown got quiet around 10-11 PM, Pasig, the city my cousins live in, was still bustling with a lot of people. A LOT. You couldn't go anywhere without seeing a dozen of them. It's also really, really polluted. The air is thick with smog and unnatural city heat, and I recalled the day before I went to Cebu we were at the Mall of Asia and I was standing on a bridge looking at the city in the distance, and all I could see was the dark grey cloud looming over the city, hovering just above the tops of buildings and skyscrapers. I'm starting to wonder if I should be like several of the other filipinos I saw while I was in the city and cover my face with a hand towel so I don't inhale the dank air of the city.

There's a lot of people selling stuff on the streets, ranging from small children to seniors, and it makes me wonder how they can make a living off of it. Most are selling like gumballs, mints, and lighters and stuff that cost only a few pesos each. To give you some perspective, $1USD is equivalent to ~P45, so they're only making a few cents off every item they sell. How can you support a family, let alone yourself, with an income like that? I also saw three kids going through the garbage looking for... I don't know what, but seeing all this really made me feel sorry for them. My uncle told me that those kids' families thought that coming to the city from the province (or country as North Americans would say. Here they're called "prombies," in North America they would be called "hicks") would give them a better life. They thought the city was paradise, but they were sadly mistaken. It's very difficult to get a job here -- the employment rate is very low unless you're a foreigner or have a very good grasp of the English language. I shared my concerns about the children going through the trash and the street vendors with my uncle and cousin, but they said you get used to it. There's no point in feeling pity for them because there's nothing you can really do; my cousin even said that some of the children just try to make money so they can huff glue. I don't know if that's supposed to make me not feel sorry for them or make me feel even more sorry for them.

Anyway, two out of three of these girls were good looking. The third one was okay; she wasn't ugly or anything. However, what happened next just ruined the night for me, despite the girls being cute. The third girl introduced us to this guy who proceeded to lay down some kind of pyramid-networking scheme on us; I knew as soon as we were introduced to him that he was going to try to sell something to us or convince us to do something. A pyramid or networking scheme is basically something involving you paying a rather large sum of money, and by telling a few of your friends about the scheme, you make a certain amount of money off of them and every person they get to join the network. Usually they're scams, but even though this place looked legit, I was far from convinced. After the initial attempt failed, the guy tried introducing us to two other people who also tried convincing us to join, and by then I was irritated, bored, and wanting the hour or so of my life back that was wasted by this shit. Even though the girl was all apologetic after, I clearly showed how displeased I was. My cousin told me if I wanted to pick up girls I had not let my emotions bother me, but I had expectations of my first night out, and one of them wasn't for my time to be wasted by some people trying to get my to join a pyramid scheme.

My cousin got the two cute girls' numbers, but I didn't bother. I didn't even talk to them, even though I'm sure they thought my limited knowledge of the language was cute. Oh well, the Philippines has millions of girls. I'm positive there will be several more opportunities within the few months I'm here. My auntie Amy even wanted me to study here, something I'm strongly considering.

I'll eventually get to posting about my time in Cebu, but I feel like posts concerning Cebu deserve a lot of thought and effort because there were many memorable moments that I feel should be shared to the best of my ability. When the time comes when I'm not lazy and discouraged from having over half my post lost due to an error I made, I'll get around to it. Until then, I'll procrastinate by attempting to satiate the readers of this blog with stories of drinking and girls. Exciting, huh?

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