Sunday at the Supermarket

So far I've only gone to my neighborhood supermarket on weekends. This would, in most places, be a busy time to go food shopping. But here it's not just busy; It's as if everyone in the city (except me) knows about some coming food rationing order -- and they're going to stock up on Spam and canned beans even if it means throwing themselves into the Sunday shopping frenzy.

(I haven't written about Spam yet, but it is extremely popular here. Check out this story.)

The frenzy is intensified by the fact that every shopper has at least three other people with him or her. After an hour of squeezing myself and my small basket between traffic jams of brimming grocery carts, I understand why people go shopping with their whole families. If traffic jams reach epic proportions in the meat aisle, the shopping cart driver can stay put while he or she dispatches an assistant to pick up the needed items. Personally, if I had this kind of grocery store backup, I would stand in line with an empty shopping cart and send my assistants out with lists of things to fill my cart.

But since I shop alone, I must navigate the store on my own and then wait in line to pay. So far, I have yet to get through a line faster than half an hour. But again, maybe I shouldn't shop on weekends.

****

Usually I hate grocery shopping, but in Asia, there's always a little adventure waiting for you in the next aisle. Here in Manila, my first trip to the grocery store was shocking. Shocking not because of what I couldn't find, but shocking because I can literally find everything. I actually had a difficult time finding food, other than mangoes, produced in the country.

To me, a country's level of "Americanization" can be measured by the cereal selection. In China, I could really only choose between Cheerios and a Chinese brand of overly sweet granola. Here, not only can I choose from an alarming number of American favorites like Frosted Flakes, Fruit Loops and Coco Puffs, but also a good sized selection of more healthy cereals. I think I must have stared at the cereal aisle in amazement for a good 15 minutes before finally choosing a Nestle concoction of banana nut clusters. (This is in a country where a traditional breakfast consists of rice and some sort of meat or fish.)

And I live in a section of Manila that is not exactly foreigner central. I can only imagine the cereal selection grocery stores in Makati, the city's business district, carry.

I believe Manila's cereal selection is something the Philippine government should advertise in brochures and reports used to lure foreign investment to the country. Then when companies relocate employees to Manila, the employees won't feel as deprived as the Larson family, an expat family in Chongqing, China recently profiled by the Wall Street Journal.

The Aug. 2 article (you have to pay to read the story, so the link is sort of useless), details the lives of American families that relocate to China for jobs. I loved the food in China, and I think the Larsons are a bit on the extreme side, but a lot of expats try to live as if they never left home.

Like many foreigners in town, Ms. Larsen says she won't touch Chongqing's signature cuisine: "huoguo," or hot pot -- a fondue-like dish so loaded with fiery chilies that its aroma seems permanently suspended in Chongqing's air, along with diesel fumes. Supermarkets feature chicken feet jutting out of crushed ice and slabs of pork dangling from sharp hooks.

Neatly dressed in slacks, a black argyle V-neck and bright white blouse, Ms. Larsen shows off her solution to the food challenge: A closet full of cans, stacked to the ceiling, with labels like Green Giant, Crisco and Hormel -- items lugged to Chongqing in suitcases or mailed from overseas. Her birthday present in February was a silver, side-by-side U.S.-sized refrigerator-freezer.

Now if the Larsons lived here, they wouldn't have to waste a whole closet on Green Giant, Crisco and Hormel products. The Philippines has fully embraced American food and products like no country I've ever experienced outside North America.

Democrazy

To say there's a lot going on in politics in the Philippines is most definitely an understatement. When I left the United States I was excited to go to a country where people actually tried to do something when they were unhappy with their government. And it has added an element of excitement to living here, just thinking about the possibility of a change in government.

I've only been here for two weeks, but increasingly I've gotten the feeling that no one actually has control of anything around here. The bureaucracy is unimaginably huge. At least two leaders (that I know of) have been toppled by popular protest here in the last two decades.

I know the system is modeled on America's political system, but I couldn't help but feel there's something distinctly different about how government works here. I just couldn't put it into words...until I read this article in the Boston Globe, that calls the political system "democrazy." The article says that politics have been so crazy in recent years that Ferdinand Marcos was ranked number one in a recent poll that asked citizens to rank the best of the last five Philippine presidents.

Filipinos are no longer sure how to remember the man whom they drove from power in a massive but peaceful revolution in 1986, turning him into an international byword for dictatorship and corruption.

These days, watching their cast of politicians fiddle while poverty deepens and Asia's economy takes off without them, many Filipinos look at the Marcos era as happier times, the good old days before their democracy turned into what they now call ''democrazy."

They ask: Was Marcos really a tyrant, or just another Asian strongman imposing order on a country desperate for stability? Was he a crook who stole from his people and stuffed billions into Swiss bank accounts, or just a politician no different from the rest, in a country where corruption is considered the oxygen of politics?

Marcos's resting place divides Filipinos: Still undecided on burial, nation revisits his legacy

Dress code for a passport photo

This morning I left my apartment early with a mission -- to get passport photos taken for my visa application. Luckily there's a photo shop in the ABS-CBN building. (A person could actually live quite well without leaving the ABS-CBN compound, which includes multiple restaurants, a cafeteria, Starbucks, a bank with an ATM, a gym, a flower shop and a place to get a foot massage).

I walked in and asked the clerk if it was too early to get a passport photo taken.

Clerk: Come back in an hour.
Me: OK
Clerk: And with a collar.
Me: What? The photo is in color?
Clerk: A collar.
Me: A collar? I have to wear a collar?
Clerk: Yes.
Me: A shirt with a collar? Really? Why?
(I was wearing a tasteful, sleeveless shirt with no collar.)
Clerk: You need a collar.
Me: Can you show me an example?
(The clerk pulls out a passport photo of someone wearing a shirt with a collar.)
Me: OK. Thanks.

I was more upset about walking back home in the heat to change my clothes than the fact that I had to change my clothes for this man to take what is essentially a mugshot.

Headline headaches

My first day in Manila I sat in an office at ABS-CBN and read one of the city's more reputible newspapers, the Philippine Daily Inquirer. The headline for the lead story was ...

GMA advised: No EVAT

I had no idea what it meant, and the first thing I thought was that copy editors in the United States have been fired for lesser offences. So I started reading the story to decode the acronyms -- and because I didn't have anything else to do. The first thing I figured out was that EVAT stands for "expanded value added tax." Jargon, jargon, jargon. It took me a while, but I also figured out that the tax is added to almost everything in the Philippines, that that the government, primarily President Arroyo, wants to raise the tax to pay off some debt (something this country seems to have a lot of).

Next, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what GMA was. And it was in almost every headline! It finally hit me when I read the seventh story about the president -- GMA stands for Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

I can just picture the headlines if this type of headline writing was used in the States.

GWB relaxes at CTR (Crawford, Texas ranch)

SC rules on SSM (Supreme Court rules on same-sex marriage)

My head hurts just thinking about it.

And let me tell you, the journalism just keeps getting better and better. On the front page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer a few days later was a photo of a woman reading ... the Philippine Daily Inquirer. The cutline was about her reacting to Arroyo impeachment news. Now that's some creative photo editing. This Monday in the Philippine Star was a photo of a protest at the People Power monument. Protests usually have plenty of visually stimulating material. But this photographer decided to take a picture of the paper's own lifestyle columnist at the protest. And it ran. Ug.

But I think the headache of the week award goes to the Daily Inquirer for a story about why expats choose to live and stay in the Philippines. It's not the topic that I dislike, but the blatant editorializing on this page 1 story. This is perhaps my favorite part about why it's great to live in the Philippines.

Many foreigners have perceived in the Philippines a special mystical quality connected to the Divine which has escaped most Filipinos. In Europe there is none of that since they have willfully destroyed the connection by prohibiting the teaching of religion or any spirituality.

I believe an editor should have willfully destroyed that story. Or at least done some editing.

The country has a free press, which is more than many countries on this side of the world can say. I can't even count the number of daily newspapers in Metro Manila; and there are three independently owned TV stations (that I know of). It's most frustrating to read terrible stories knowing that the press here has so much potential.

Sunset

A sunset over Manila after some terrible rain. This was taken from my 6th floor apartment.

Sleepless in Quezon City

Quezon City, one of many cities that make up Metro Manila, is the broadcasting enclave of the Philippines. It’s also where I live, two short blocks from the ABS-CBN compound.

I saw my apartment a few hours after landing in Manila. A studio with a small kitchen and air conditioning, the space struck me as clean, quiet and well lit. I was excited to move in, if only to get out of my hotel room. Hotels are generally fine, and they offer things like furniture and towels, items I had yet to purchase. But staying in a hotel in a strange city alone was a bit unnerving this time around. I was anxious. I wanted to see where I would be living for a year.

When I moved in the apartment only had a bed. It still only has a bed – except now the bed has pillows and sheets, and the shower now has a shower curtain.

My first night in my studio I was getting ready to go to sleep early, still working out my jet lag, when loud music started blaring. It must be my neighbors, I thought. They must be night owls. Good thing, because usually I am too. But then I realized the music was coming from outside.

And then the singing started.

Yup, I’m back in Asia. Karaoke. Except this time the karaoke is in a different format. No more drunken business men singing “I Will Always Love You” at the local bar. In my Quezon City neighborhood, the singing takes place out on the street block-party style with men taking turns belting out their favorite sappy love songs. (After being here a week, I realize the singing can start as early as 7 p.m. and last up until midnight. Apparently some karaoke nights are slower than others and the singers will head home at 10.)

I finally started to drift off to sleep when the volume was suddenly turned up on the karaoke/devil device.

I can’t liiiiiive, if livin’ is without yoooou; I can’t liiiiiiive…

Ahhhh! Why me?

I took another pillow and buried my head in it enough to muffle the noise. Sometime in the middle of the night I must have moved the pillow, because I jolted awake to the sound of a pack of barking dogs at 4 a.m.

This was not your average Fido howling at a siren, but what sounded like 20 canines barking in unison at an armed intruder. They barked for what felt like half an hour.

When they stopped I could feel sweet, sweet sleep creeping over my eyelids. Finally.

Cock-a-doodle-doooo! (Or, coco rico, as they say in France. Thank you, David Sedaris, for reporting on foreign barn animal noises. I'll have to find out what Filipinos say when imitating their beloved birds.)

My groggy brain could barely process the sound. It was 5:30 a.m. Roosters? What the? I’m in the middle of a massive city!

One rooster crow was followed by another, which was followed by 400 more. The Filipino obsession with raising roosters for cockfighting no longer seemed like a cultural quirk, but like something destined to keep me from sleeping for a year.

Lucky for me, when I’m not jet lagged, I’m a heavy sleeper. Last night I went to bed after the karaoke party, and slept through the dogs and the roosters. For the first time in my life, I welcomed the sound of my alarm clock at 6:30 a.m.

Where I work

So far I've spent about a week at ABS-CBN, the largest TV station in the Philippines. I'm really still trying to figure out what's going on here, and what I'll be doing for the station. Last week I spent Thursday and Friday shadowing reporters on assignment. This week I'll be at a training session, and supposedly writing news scripts for the station's 24-hour news channel that broadcasts in English.

I haven't had much time to sit down and update this blog, so I thought I would at least post this story from the International Hearld Tribune (again) about ABS-CBN. It will give you a good idea of what broadcasting and journalism is like in the Philippines, as well as lots of interesting tidbits about where I work.

In the Philippines, fine line between TV and politics
IHT, Aug. 15, 2005

What am I getting into this time?

In less than a week I'm off to Manila. Since I've never been to the Philippines and have no idea what to expect, I've been trying to read up on the place I will soon call home. After spending a year in China, I have an idea of the initial chaos that awaits me. I say "initial," because the craziness I experienced in China seemed to disappear after acclimation. (Although, I will say, you never really get used to the sight of a shoeless man hanging from a thin rope cleaning windows 30 stories up or women dressed in pajamas shopping in fancy department stores.)

Of course, each country has its own culture and ways of doing things, so I'm sure landing in Manila will be like diving into Lake Tahoe in December -- you're never really prepared for the shock.

So far my Lonely Planet guide book has been useless. It basically says you wouldn't want to spend more than a few days in Manila. Fantastic. The only information about the Philippines I've been able to find in the U.S. press is about President Arroyo's recent problems. So instead I've turned to the international press. Lucky for me the International Herald Tribune recently ran a story about Manila's mayor, Bayani Fernando -- a sort of Rudy Giuliani of Southeast Asia. His goal, it seems, is not only to clean up Manila, but also to add a dash of color to the city of more than 13 million.

Here's an excerpt from the article that hints at what I have to look forward to:

The metropolitan area, which covers 630 square kilometers, or 240 square miles, is notorious for its traffic. The sheer number of vehicles staggers the imagination.
Undisciplined drivers weave around street vendors, competing with the ubiquitous jeepney, the gaudy vans devised from World War II military Jeeps that are the main mode of transportation here.
Street crime is rampant. A good portion of the population resides in shantytowns and on the streets, tens of thousands of them living off the 6,700 tons of garbage the metropolis generates daily.
Of this garbage, 1,500 tons a day are dumped into creeks, rivers and Manila Bay, which reeks, discouraging people from watching its famed sunset. Floods caused by trash that clogs the waterways are a common occurrence.

Lesson: Don't swim in Manila Bay and watch out for those nasty floods caused by garbage.

The story goes on to say that Fernando has improved Metro Manila quite a bit, particularly with increased garbage pickup and, get this, roadside urinals for men, "whose habit of urinating anywhere they please contributes to the stink and results as well in what is possibly uniquely Metro Manilan: iron doors and gates corroded by urine."

But possibly the best part of Fernando's reforms, in my opinion, is that he has painted all pedestrian structures pink. It's his favorite color, naturally, and, as the article states, he thinks it has a calming effect on commuters stuck in traffic. We'll see about that.

You can view the IHT's story here.