Manila is the Anti-Tokyo

Tokyo to Manila. What a change. Two enormous Asian cities, but that's where the similarity stops.

Tokyo: Clean, organized, visually intelligible, visible wealth. The people are polite in an anticipate-other-people's-needs-but-don't-impose kind of way. It's surprisingly difficult to get by in English. Weather: Warm and somewhat humid.

Manila: Grimy, filthy, polluted, chaotic, disorienting, with evidence of extreme long-term poverty dominating almost every view. The people are friendly in an approach-foreigners-constantly-with-greetings-offers-and-demands kind of way. It's surprisingly easy to get by in English. Temperature in the mid-thirties and very high humidity making it feel even hotter.

I'll temper my social observations with an acknowledgement that I haven't seen all or even most of Manila, but from what I experienced, the only good things I can say are in the category of "at least it's not worse." At least it's not actually even dirtier than it in fact is. At least more people aren't trying to rip you off even more than they already are. At least the smell of rotting garbage and urban decay only caused me to wish I would lose consciousness rather than actually making me lose consciousness.

But really, this isn't the whole picture. In fact, I caught a glimpse of two Manilas.

Manila #1: Outside

This is most of Manila, as seen from the neighbourhoods around both our hotels (one a lightly fortified compound in a slummy part of Pasay City, the other in the tourist-hotel nexus of Ermita/Malate), from our walks in what might loosely be termed as the tourist-friendly parts of the city, and all of what we saw from taxi and train windows. The main features of Manila #1 are essentially those I've described above.

Manila #2: Malls

Mall culture in Manila is like nothing I've ever seen. It's a major, day-long destination for (upper-)middle-class families, and is something like a hermetically sealed fantasy of actual and wishful consumption of global brands and American-TV lifestyles. I don't know where these people are when they're not in the malls, because I do not see them anywhere else in Manila. We did pass through some neighbourhoods with walled compounds, so maybe they live in there.

One of the biggest appeals of Manila #2, and one of the reasons we headed for the mammoth and more-or-less-nearby Mall of Asia almost immediately upon arrival, is that malls are air-conditioned. You show up at the entrance, are frisked for weapons and have your belongings searched or poked at with a stick, depending on the inclination of the security guard, and then are welcomed by lovely cold air like angels coming to envelop you in a cloud of love as they gently transport you to heaven. I've always hated air conditioning, but now I have learned to worship it.

Once inside the mall, it is of course the same hell of chain stores and Total Consumption Management as in any big North American city, but I am willing to put up with it, at least for a while. In one mall this took the form of braving our way through the in-mall Catholic mass (complete with chairs set up on two mall levels) in order to see what movies were on at the mall's cinema. All four screens turned out to be playing Spiderman 3, all day. (Perhaps there's another cinema in the mall? Yes, upstairs. Seven screens. Also all playing Spiderman 3. We saw Spiderman 3. Only fools try to resist their destiny.)

Back to the Mall of Asia. It's actually more a complex of mall buildings which are almost but not quite contiguous, therefore involving periodic micro-forays Outside, and then a new security pat-down and probe. Surprisingly, in the middle of one of the main mall buildings, there's an ice rink, which comes complete with periodic snowfall accompanied by a trite "Hooray! The snow is falling!" jingle from the loudspeakers.

Speaking of music, it is almost everywhere and there appears to be a heavy preference for extremely sappy love songs -- as in, Filipino popular music! Now fortified with 200% more sap! In fact, the internet cafe I currently find myself in is now playing a schlocky cliché-ridden ballad, *and* one of the staffers has produced a guitar and is playing and singing along either out of tune, or in tune in another and rapidly shifting key, depending on which half of the glass you tend to see.

But I digress. In sum: we arrived in Manila and were in shock. But no matter, we were off the next day for our tropical paradise: El Nido. At least, that's the way we were still thinking of it then. But that's another blog entry.

[I realize that right now you might be thinking, "Oh no! It sounds like your holiday was a disaster!", or perhaps, "Jeff, you're really being unfairly hard on the Philippines." Don't worry. The Philippines has also come up with its share of pleasant experiences and encounters. Stay tuned!]