Manila - Landing with a Bump
Health warning – this blog is a bit grumpy. I think it’s called culture shock.
After living in Singapore for over a year, first impressions of Manila couldn’t help but be unfavourable, especially so after a week of merrily boozing with all our friends and generally feeling good Singapore vibes. The night before we left, we drunkenly arrived back at the flat with Jen and Lucy to donate them all the stuff we couldn’t take to Manila. We happily commandeered a luggage trolley and rode around Fraser Suites on it with Andy pulling. At one point we were in the lift when the doors closed and it went up to the 6th floor. 3 bemused Chinese people were greeted as the lift opened by 3 drunken English girls riding a luggage trolley that filled up the whole lift. We waved, they gamely waved back, and Jen took a photo of them which they politely smiled for. Then the lift went down again.
After such Enid Blyton style high jinks, actually waking up the next morning, jumping on our suitcases to try and close the damn things, and getting on the plane was a bit of a come down. The nice lady at Singapore airways was a bit shocked that we were 57 kilos over our combined weight allowance but only charged us £100 which was pretty decent of her, and very different from the rottweilers at Heathrow who made me empty out my suitcases for my first trip to Singapore and sent Andy home with half the contents wrapped up in a sarong like a refugee.
The first night we stayed at the Peninsula, to ease gracefully into our new Manila home. On the Friday, we took a taxi to the condo, dumped the suitcases and contemplated our new life. This was a little depressing. We are living in a condo on the 17th floor in the middle of Makati, the business district of Manila. The view largely consists of half finished buildings, some of which Indian men are pulling down brick by brick with sledge hammers, scooting around 15 floors up, fully in the open with absolutely no safety barriers whatsoever.
The condo is quite big but a bit dark and with a décor that dates back to the mid 70s – everything is that jaundice yellowy beige colour which makes you feel a bit ill. The settee was designed for midgets, and the mattress on the bed is so old that it slopes down on both sides so you have to claw to the middle of the bed to avoid being unceremoniously dumped on the floor in the middle of the night. Small (mercifully non-bitey) ants are busily colonising the place, are making significant inroads and have established a small embassy in the sitting room. We could have stayed in a nice serviced apartment but I let myself be cornered into renting a condo which is a lot cheaper. I still got into trouble though cos it meant signing a contract which the lawyer in London took umbrage at and it caused a 5 day multi-national row in AMS. So, to save the company money I got into trouble and ended up in a dodgy condo. That didn’t go as well as it could have done. Things didn’t really look up when Andy switched the 2 TVs round and one of them blew up, and later when one of the lights exploded and the place was pitched into darkness. Electricity is a tricky business in Manila.
It quickly became clear that we needed to buy shedloads of stuff, so we went out in the roasting, pollution-enhanced furnace that is midday in Makati and located “Landmark” an “Are You Being Served” style department store specialising in garish “ho” handbags, clothes with such a high polyester content that you risk self-immolation walking past the racks too quickly, and an abundance of cheap and cheerful home goods, chiefly made out of plastic.
Armed with our list we set off round the homewares section. No trolleys are available which somewhat hampers the actual purchase of goods. There are about 37 employees on the floor but none of them seem to think it’s their job to assist you as you stumble about overloaded with toasters, saucepans and drying racks. When you want to buy an electrical item, you have to go find a flunky who will locate one from stores, remove it from its packaging and test it on some dodgy looking plug in the corner. This ritual cannot be by-passed. As you walk around the floor, whichever of the 37 staff is guarding that particular section announces desultorily as you walk by; “Sir, Ma’am, umbrellas … mops … arsenic” or whatever the item is. If you then ask about a different item, they stare at you blankly. It’s an excellent system.
When you eventually arrive at the counter, staffed by 8 people, firstly everyone stares at you for (a) being white and (b) buying such vast amounts of stuff, then they crack on the with the business of entering the purchases onto the till, someone else recording all the purchases on a bit of brown envelope, other people packing the stuff into bags, the brown envelope man cross-checking the stuff in the bags, others still stapling up the bags and putting tape on them, and someone else dealing with the payment. The whole thing takes about 2 hours. We had to repeat this 4 times in our first weekend.
Then the supermarket. Despite having lived all over the place, I’m always completely fazed by supermarkets with foreign brands cos it takes so long to figure out what anything actually is. Filipinos are not a health-conscious bunch so everything is 90% lard. Things you can’t actually buy in Manila – Ribena, tampons (I suspect the Catholic church has decreed them to be immoral) and egg-cups. Andy has developed an obsession for egg-cups and we went to no less than 5 separate shops to try and find them. It is surprisingly difficult to explain the concept of an egg-cup to someone from a culture that doesn’t have them, especially when they stare at you like you are retarded. A cup.. for an egg? What’s the point? That’s completely stupid. Did we think they were idiots? One man was so disgusted at the idea that he just walked off mid conversation.
The first weekend all we did was buy stuff in Landmark, queue for hours for taxis to lug it home, try and locate edible food, and unpack. No-one from work called to see if we were OK, and I couldn’t get hold of our one friend here. It was like we had dropped off the edge of the world and we were feeling very sorry for ourselves, sitting in the dark and waging war on the ants by stabbing them individually with a tissue. On the positive side, bottles of San Miguel are 17 pesos a go (about 20p) so we got through quite a few of those.
Things perked up a bit at work because there were humans there. The team are trying to get used to having the weird Brit around. Tensions flared briefly during a discussion about the position of desks in the office when I suggested that we move 2 desks to be close to another 6 so that a team of 8 could sit together. The manager said no, we can’t do that because it’s bad feng shui – it would have meant 2 people sitting with their backs to the windows. Apparently the evil spirits come to your unguarded backs and do bad stuff. We’ve had this debate before. She was utterly serious. I went “oh piss OFF” very loudly and announced to everyone in the office that their leader is mad and they should not follow her. Everyone looked a bit scared as we had a good natured row. In the end I had to give up because she had the intensity in her eyes of the religious zealot and it wasn’t worth falling out over.
Culture-wise in Manila, people are very friendly but the main issue we’ve encountered is a sense of humour disconnect. Without wishing to cause offence to the Filipino nation, I think it’s fair to say that someone slipping on a banana skin would be considered a comedy high-point that would have everyone belly-laughing for days. English style humour is met with incomprehension, staring and polite smiles. It could be a long 6 months. I went to “Body Combat”, a Fitness First class which is good for visualising whatever fuckwit has made one’s life miserable on that particular day as one happily punches and kicks to loud music, and there was one random fat guy there whose sole function seemed to be class clown. He’d do the stuff for a couple of minutes then get bored and walk up to other people and shake their hands or kiss them. Once he went up on stage and started doing impressions of the instructor. I was a novelty as I was new, white and 2 feet taller than everyone else so he kept looking at me. I concentrated on looking fierce. I don’t mean to be rude but if he came up and kissed me he’d be looking at a punch in the face. I think he got the message because he limited contact to hand-shaking and “funny” remarks. Everyone else thought he was hilarious.
While we’re in Manila I still have responsibility for teams in some other countries. My most culturally bemused moment this week was when I got an email from the manager in Japan saying that someone had resigned. I said this was a shame etc etc and just checked that her last day would be in one month’s time. Apparently not – she resigned and said that’s, it, I won’t be back. The manager wrote “Her last day is May 7th which is yesterday. She wanna quit yesterday so I did asked her why but she is looking just become busy. Maybe her husband rush her or something but that is too private so I didn’t asked her.” Brilliant! The Japanese are so polite that to avoid an awkward conversation the recruiter looked a bit busy and the manager didn’t want to interrupt or cause offence so she just left and we still have no clue why.
Anyway, this blog is a bit miserable but I’m sure we’ll perk up. The thing is, the Philippines is a beautiful place – I saw the pictures in the Lonely Planet and they are very exciting – but Manila is not. It’s a bit like when I volunteered to work in Kenya then discovered that living off Ngong Road in Nairobi is not the same as staying in a tented camp in the Masai Mara. In the olden days I could have been born a rich man and been a proper explorer: now I have to travel the work through the medium of outsourcing. Not really the same.
Jo 13 May 2008
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