Manila and the Umbrella's Enemy

Something I glossed over in the previous post is that I was trying to ignore the fact that I was getting sick with some sort of cold or mild flu all day on the 15th (OMG MAYBE ITS SWINE FLU?), and when the constantly running sinus kicked in that afternoon (ONE OF THE SYMPTOMS OF SWINE FLU?) I started to worry I might not make it through Manila Quarantine control.

In fact, I needn't have worried, I lied on the form and unlike Korea no-one here takes your temperature or even reads the form when you hand it to them, they just have you walk past a thermal camera, which apparently thought I was fine (SO MAYBE THEY LET IN SOME SWINE FLU?!). I was hangdog tired and feeling green when I reached my hostel at 7AM, and so I dropped my bags by the bed and curled up immediately.

The hostel in question was directly next to a construction site, and the constant clamour of hammering and drilling and sawing might have been bad if I weren't possessed of a rather odd gift to parse out even non-rhythmic noises in my environment and ignore them in favour of sleep when I'm tired enough. As long as the noise is there when I go to bed, I can sleep right on through it, so I did, and I slept until almost noon, then I called a couple of the people I had promised to meet this weekend, one through OkC and one through Couchsurfing, and eventually made plans with one of them for dinner.

I woke to the rain. It's been the "rainy season" throughout Asia, and I've had a bit of a downpour along the way--a heavy blustery afternoon in Hong Kong, a couple of thorough drizzles in Bangkok, but overall, it's been no more-or-less rainy than back home at this time of year.

Manila is a completely different story. When I had last checked the weather from Indonesia, about three weeks ago, there was a typhoon here. By the time I'd visited Bali and Thailand, there was another one.

So I exited my hostel's building to a drizzle, which turned into a proper rain at the corner. I stepped into the local 7-11 to top up my new number and buy an umbrella to replace the one I'd bought in Hong Kong, since it was now showing that a couple of the spines had snapped and turning inside out whenever the slightest zephyr touched it.

I bought their cheapest, smallest umbrella, since I wanted one that would be practical to transport, and it ran me about $2 US.

As it turned out later, I should have upgraded, else I was going to have a $2 umbrella cost in my budget for every day I was here.

I trudged through the rain to a laundrymat a couple of blocks away, but since it was already almost 2, they wouldn't be done with my clothes until the following night, so I'd have to make do with what I had.

I wanted to improve my sleeping arrangements slightly, even if I could sleep through the clamour, the place where I was staying had no common area, and no soul, really, it was just a set of rooms with beds. I also felt like having a little privacy, especially if I was going to be coughing and clearing my throat for the next two days (WHILE GETTING OVER THE SWINE FLU?).

With this in mind I went from the laundrymat to the nearest station for the local light rail line. On the way, since it was temporarily not raining heavily, there was a cart on the corner under moderate shelter selling what looked like whole fried potatoes, and turned out to be the fattest bananas I'd ever seen, rolled in palm sugar and deep fried. They were amazing, and two of them cost me about 30 cents.

I went two stops down the LRT, making note of the fact that I was the only Westerner I saw--Manila's not much of a Tourist Hot Spot and I don't think those that do come will brave the public transport. I walked a few blocks, picked up some necessities, and then using the tourist map I'd picked up at the airport and the vague directions on their website to find "Friendly's Guesthouse" and made a reservation for a private room with a fan and a bed, for about $10 US. It's basically a monk's cell (unfortunately minus the desk). It was perfect.

After that, I went back to my hostel and figured out how I was going to get to the place where I was meeting Ruby, a local who wanted to show me the Philippine social scene.

That meant we were going to the mall.

The Filipino people, Ruby explained as we walked through the open-air Greenbelt mall campus, live in the malls. She asserts it's actually kind of freaky, and along the way she points out this building to me--it's a church. It's hard to tell from the shot due to the trees, but that mall and the surrounding trees all sit in the center of a giant circular mall--they have mass, in a church, in a mall.

The mind boggles.

But first I had to get there. I gave myself an hour to walk to the LRT station, ride it to the end of the line, switch to the MRT 3 (another light rail system in Manila) and ride it out to my stop, then walk the couple hundred meters to where we were meeting up. It turned out I needed almost an hour and a half--the LRT and the MRT, despite being almost identical rail systems, do not allow transfers. At the terminals of LRT1, where it meets the MRT, you must walk out of one station, and into the other, and despite the fact that they use identical types of payment cards, the stored value cards from one (the LRT, which I had) don't work on the other (the MRT, which I was boarding) of course, I figured this out when the ticket gate rejected my card, as there are almost no signs in Manila*, and had to go to the ticket window and wait in line to buy a ticket instead, then catch the next train out.

*The Filipino people, like many Asian cultures, do not believe in signage. About one quarter of all intersections might have a street sign, but if they do, it will often only be for one of the two streets at that intersection, not both. However, unlike most of the Asian mass transit I've seen, there are no signs in the LRT and MRT stations either. In fact, the LRT 1 is the only Light Rail Line I know (and I've ridden quite a few) where the line route is not displayed above the doors in the cars--once you're on the train, you'd better know what the hell you're doing or where you're going, because nothing in the train will help you.

But anyway, after some frantic wading through jostling crowds of Filipinos, I finally found my way to Ayala Museum, where I was to meet Ruby.

After wandering through the mall so Ruby could show me how unsettling it was, we had a lovely dinner of Indian food (Lamb, as her pet chick recently died and she sees her now when she tries to eat Chicken) and chatted up a storm. She's a regular traveler, having studied in Vancouver, she has spent a lot of time in Canada and the states, and is planning to move to the states soon with her boyfriend, who is currently in Virginia. She's whip smart, invoking references to pop culture and literature along the way, and it was a great evening, even if she does make the mistake of asking about Life and Castle and letting me ramble about how good both shows are for half an hour. Each.

We sat in the outdoor balcony portion of the restaurant, and watched the drizzle turn to a downpour for perhaps half an hour, then slowly recede back to a steady dripping mess. As the mall made the lumbering shift from place-you-went-for-dinner to place-you-went-clubbing, the sound systems were cranked up, and as the rain receded western pop music began to blare throughout the corridors. Lady Gaga's Poker Face and Justin Timberlake seem inescapable here.

Eventually, we parted ways and I head back to my hostel. The rain and wind are not bad on the way to the LRT, and I managed to catch the last train (the system shuts down around 2230!) back to my part of town. When I left the station though, I encountered the remarkable wind.

The wind here is a malicious, living thing, and it has a mortal enemy--the umbrella.

My brand new umbrella, purchased that very morning, did not even survive the six short blocks on the way back to my hostel. The rain had picked back up, and now the wind came on. It wasn't a steady, directed rush like you'd expect from a hurricane, it was a series of bursts and gusts, each one seemingly calculated to fill the umbrella with as much air as possible. One second the poor thing would be almost folded in two as I shouldered into it down the street, and then in the next the wind would be at my back, and my umbrella would be inside out before me, fluttering pitifully.

If I put it to rights again and then put it low on my right shoulder, the wind would immediately come at me from the left. Sometimes you had to hold the umbrella so low in front of you that you literally couldn't see, and you had to take tiny, fleeting glances out from behind it, as if you were engaged in deadly combat with some murderous sniper.

It was absurd and comical and if I hadn't been slowly getting drenched, I would have laughed aloud at the time.

There was a final angry gust at the mouth of the alley that led to the rear entrance of my building, as if the Wind knew I was about to take the Umbrella where it could not follow, and it turned the poor thing completely inside out and tore the fabric from three of the spokes in one vicious act. Two of the spokes had snapped under the pressure, and the whole thing looked like I'd thrown it into 275 during a period of particularly heavy traffic.

So I finally abandoned my bedraggled, broken umbrella in a bin just outside my apartment building, and climbed the stairs to my waiting bed with anticipation, I was tired, and worn out from fighting with my sickness, the light rail and the storm.