Magi and I had pancakes for breakfast and we made them ourselves! This news might not be that exciting to most people but for us it is. The joy of reaching into a fridge or a cupboard and then making something to eat is a luxury wasted on the non-travellers of the world. Sure to some eating out is the most fun; you don't have to cook or clean up. But when you have gone for months hunting down your next meal it's a relief to be able to cook what you want, when you want it and to not have to explain to a trying-to-be-helpful waiter that vegetarians don't eat squid or shrimp.
We've been here for a week now and are so travel-weary that we haven't really left the neighbourhood. Keep in mind that we have been sans maison since May and that the perfect guesthouse we've been looking for has materialized as Magi's parents' condo. Plus it's hard to get inspired to go out when the heat and humidity is so super-oppressive and adjusting to the heat is made more difficult by the sub-zero temperatures you always encounter when entering any indoor space.
It's my first Christmas without cold weather (I am not counting A/C as cold weather) and it's a little surreal to walk around and have speakers popping out of manicured shopping mall gardens like sprinklers singing Jingle Bells and These Three Kings. This being a devoutly Catholic country, Christmas is like, well, Christmas around here. I was concerned, up until yesterday, that I was missing out on Filipino culture because we are completely surrounded by malls and lured by their cool temperatures whenever we walk outside. Magi told me that this obsession with shopping and eating out IS Filipino culture (albeit modern) and I'm really beginning to believe her. Though I am unsure as to whether the hoards of shoppers are merely there to stock up on gifts for under the tree, I feel like it's much more controlled and ordinary than that. People aren't shopping with the unique enthusiasm of finding the right shirt or soap on a rope for grandpa, they are shopping with an everyday enthusiasm of finding a good deal. The crowds or women holding up tanktops and underwear at the bargain bins are calm about it, like they are just there to see if anything has been added since their previous visit the last week or a few days ago.
My favourite part of the mall (a phrase I didn't think I'd ever use) is the product demonstrations. Sometimes it's for a vacuum packing machine that makes those ever-annoying bags of stuffed animals shrink down to half their size or the super cloths that soak up all the water in your bathtub and still have room for more. The announcers up on their pedestals never fail to interrupt themselves to greet the people walking by with "Hello ma'am" or "Hello sir". Their promo speeches, like most conversation in the Philippines, is spoken in Taglish- a mix between English and the national language of Tagalog. So to me, it sounds something like this, “blah blah blah very absorbent blah blah blah today only blah blah blah plastic handle blah blah.” It’s a little thing but it makes me giggle whenever I hear it, not just in the malls.
My least favourite part of shopping here are the constant reminders of terrorism. In every mall entrance and in most store entrances within the mall, you get into the female or male line and proceed through the guard who swipes you and your bag with a sensor or pokes a stick into your bag to look for bomb components (or both). Their table has a print out of common bomb parts to make identifying them easy for the guard. Even restaurants ask their patrons to keep their weapons at the door with security personnel (is this Texas?) This kind of security might make some people feel safer but for me it just reminds me of the potential threat of terrorism and makes me wish the guard would take a extra second or two looking in bags since it most often feels like just a formality and not a real search.
Let me just say that we are not in an unsafe neighbourhood. There are practically no tourists in this area and we are far away from the violent separatists in the south. Nevertheless this constant reminder of a threat looms and living in NYC has probably made us a little more sensitive to these things.
One final note before I head off into the heat of this mid-morning Monday. I am taken aback by the level of hospitality Filipinos have shown towards us. I found most people in Thailand to be very cheerful also (at least those that weren't totally jaded by tourism) but theirs was a quieter and more gentle friendliness. Everyone here is very friendly in an outgoing way. People in stores and restaurants are sincerely eager to make you happy and even guards greet you with a smile and “welcome”. Based in no way on scientific measures, I would say that in my experience, this is the friendliest country I have been to in Asia.
tothesea,
k~*