Life outside the window is fascinating. Watching other peoples daily lives revolve around the hours in a day makes a person wonder at how we do it. Looking down from a high vantage point, I see a never ending landscape of rusted tin roofs, skyscrapers rising as if they are giant monoliths searching for a way out. Smog waits patiently to engulf the noisy city. As dusk closes in, people gain a new energy and seem in a hurry to get wherever they are going. The lights flicker and jump, neon flashes and announces a buy 5 beers get one free deal.
The city is Makati, Manila. It is noisy, busy and sometimes very very smoggy. I watch and learn about people and the type of lives they lead. One man pedals a tricycle past my hotel with the box on the back laden with watermelons. Another is squatting beside the road, as if surveying his domain. Pedestrians on the main road going south to the city are all ignorant that life is going on all around them. Their mind is focused on their destination or their work.
A family, consisting of a couple with a 2 to 3 year old child and an older male, plus a dog, lives on the construction site next to my hotel. I watch them going about their daily lives as they wake up and leave the shelter of an unfinished underground car park. They sleep there, and in the early hours, the wife, I assume, goes out with the child and seems to go through the garbage around the site and on the streets enclosing it. She takes a bag back inside and washes her hands thoroughly. She then prepares the morning meal; it looks like boiled rice this morning. After breakfast, she washes the dishes, or the husband does and they bathe, fully clothed, under a cold water tap. The whole family bathes, even the dog. The wife has a job in a laundry one street over, and the husband looks after the child. The older man seems to just stay on the site 24 hours a day, occasionally wandering around with his star picket staff to stretch his legs. At noon, the husband cooks another meal, then he and the child have a nap in a shelter, which is made from chipboard on trestles under a rusted corrugated iron roof. The workers that are building occasionally chat with him, otherwise they just work.
The wife returns after dark, and usually cooks the evening meal. They sometimes get a board and some wood to make a table out in the open, or they go under a concrete roofed structure being built. There is nothing for the child to play with, even the dog is tied up most of the day, even though the site is fully enclosed. They seem to go to bed early and most days are just the same. Tonight they have gone out, I saw them as a family going out the back gate.
There are many dilapidated houses mixed in with brand new luxury hotels in this area. It also has vacant lots that other people seem to live in for a day or so. One or two vagrants wander the streets looking like they rolled in dirt just for fun. The stores open late, about 11am, but stay open until 10pm. Most stores are a mixture of things. There is a drugstore that is also a mini market, a massage parlor (for normal massages, not sexual ones), above a restaurant and a grocery store that also does laundry. There are sex stores, you see men going in there after 9pm and they seem closed until mid afternoon. There are money changing booths on nearly every street and there is a pizza hut and a KFC next to a noodle shop. Construction sites are everywhere, it seems they are building every square inch up instead of out.
My construction site family has returned home and the husband is cooking another meal while the child plays with the dog, which she holds on a piece of rope. It is almost dark now, so they will probably eat and go to bed. No electricity seems to be evident on the site, or the workers leave with the cords when they finish work, as the husband and wife use torches and candles. Pedestrians and cyclists and cars go past oblivious to this family. Groups of people seem to gather on the street corners here, usually in front of a restaurant.
I watch the construction workers building a skyscraper next to the hotel. They are always late starting in the morning but work late into the night. They all seem to have a nap around lunch time for an hour or two.
Manila is a dirty city. Rubbish is everywhere, in garbage bags, or just piled in gutters. People urinate down side streets and guards and police turn a blind eye. All guards and police are armed, and there are many of them. We have 4 just around our hotel. I don’t know why they are there, or what purpose they serve as they just seem to stand all day and talk amongst themselves. One woman with a small boy actually let the boy defecate on the street verge outside the hotel and picked up a piece of rubbish to wipe him clean.
When I get up in the early morning, the city is covered in brown smog. It looks dirty and doesn’t dissipate until late morning if at all. Some mornings you can see the ocean, 5 km away or so, some you can’t even see 1 km away. It just seems to thin out. Certain areas in the city surrounds are clean and well tended; they seem to be upper class living areas and new shopping malls. The malls are high end, very over priced. You have to go into the dirtier areas to get the cheap deals, and local grocery stores. One supermarket here is reasonable and has quite a decent selection of foods. The people here are shopaholics, even though they don’t look like they can afford the high end malls, you often see them exiting with 4 or 5 bags with Nike or other brand name on it.
Well, disillusion has set in. The husband that lives on the construction site, the male who has no job and spends his day cooking or sleeping, has a cell phone! What on earth would you need a mobile phone for if you live on a construction site, cook meals over a stove you rigged from the rubble on the site, and your wife works one street from where you live? It makes no logical sense. It seems everyone thinks they need a mobile phone.
There seem to be no road rules in this city. The cars are constantly moving to any part of the road they see is clear, even if it isn’t 10 meters further on. The drivers love to use the car horn every chance they get. Jeepnees and motorcyclists think they own the road and go through red lights or over footpaths to get where they are going. If you want to cross the road, you run. If you are lucky, a guard will be polite and stop a few cars; otherwise you are on your own. The jeepnees cost 7 pesos to ride on (about 15 cents Aussie), but you don’t get a pleasant ride, a bus made to carry 12 people sometimes will carry 20 in rush hour. I saw one man pushed out while the thing was still driving through the traffic, luckily he jumped up fast. The taxis are also cheap, the flag fall starts at 30 pesos (70 cents) and it costs about $1 to drive into the city, which is about 1.5-2km from the hotel). Walking can be hazardous as there are no formal footpaths and cars park anywhere. Also, the smell of raw sewerage on your walk is not a pleasant experience. You also have to dodge the numerous piles of rubbish and poo.
It is a rainy Sunday morning and the Filipinos are either staying indoors or at church. The religion here seems predominantly catholic and I have seen a few roadside shrines. I am surprised that there are not churches on every block though. I expected more of those. On my walk around the block this morning, I discovered there are local stores on even the back streets. These areas are even dirtier than the main thoroughfares but the stores are interesting. I think they cater mainly to locals as they sell a lot of staple foods like rice and noodles and sauces. Some foodstuffs don’t have any English on the packages so it is a guess as to what is inside. Maybe that is where the term pot luck came from! There are more taxis on the road than normal cars today, but there is very little traffic and you notice the absence of horns. The rain is light, and has not washed the city clean unfortunately; I think it has actually worsened the smells.
I have come to Manila to get new teeth, it has opened up a whole new world for me. I have new lovely teeth, have been through agony and been fascinated by the life through my window. I will never never come back here though. Manila is not my cup of tea!
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