eleven degrees north

A Pox on the Brooklyn Bridge

2011-12-17T20:53:00.001-06:00

The most beautiful part of the Brooklyn Bridge is a metal rod protruding from the edge of its pedestrian walkway. This rod is on the south side of the walkway, closer to Brooklyn than Manhattan, covered in rust and connected to a large pipe daubed with gloppy grey paint and plastered with graffiti stickers.

The most beautiful things on the bridge that are not part of the bridge itself are the dozen or so padlocks dangling from this metal rod.

The bridge is renowned for its design—its thick, substantial stone columns, the sturdy reach of its powerful arms spanning the East River—but what really make the bridge beautiful are its flaws: the pits in its sculpted stone, its oxidized metals, the anomalous abandoned padlocks hanging like neglected Christmas ornaments in February. The entire massive majesty of the bridge bows to a vibrant orange pox on a hunk of metal left out in the rain.

Relentless engineering has produced one sort of perfection—the perfection of lines, of pressure point supports and cable tensions—but flawlessness of this sort is only necessary, not beautiful or interesting. The Brooklyn Bridge is fortunate in its old age, because thanks to the effects of time and weather and sloppy artistry it has in some ways achieved a sort of attractiveness in addition to its functionality.

It’s certainly no longer notable for its technical achievements—as I crossed it on foot recently I marveled at the sheer amount of human effort needed to span such a narrow creek as the East—but as it wears away, it gains a beauty of its own: the beauty of roughness, of edges rubbed smooth or broken off jagged, of stains and natural colors. Give me this any day over perfect spires and spit-shined glass.

People themselves will certainly never be perfect, so the pursuit of and obsession over an arbitrary perfection and precision in aesthetics seems a bit inhuman. And it can be callous—see the example of New York’s pending “Freedom Tower” (now thankfully known by the less offensive name “One World Trade Center”), an image-driven structure that, when completed, will plumb the depths of both blind nationalism and sheer silliness with a rooftop needle culminating at precisely 1776 feet. Why? Because America, that’s why.

Then again: I like clean lines sometimes, and dramatic swoops, and shapes you never see in nature. My aesthetic sensibilities are no more stable and unchanging than anyone else’s. As Whitman triumphantly yawped: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.”

But the sight of those rust-rashed padlocks was more compelling than the bridge itself, and their erratic clinking in the river’s cross-breezes seemed more complex than any human-arranged symphony.

I tell myself this even as I sit (right at this moment) in the carefully-curated lobby of the Ace Hotel on West 29th, drinking coffee prepared by self-conscious baristas who probably spend as much time finding the perfect tilt to their fedoras as they do pouring milk into leaf and heart designs. I’m arranging and rearranging these words as if I can hit upon their perfect sequence. Writing about nature’s sublime ravages.

Do I contradict myself?

Theater of the Tunnels

2011-12-07T21:53:00.001-06:00

Screeches, wails, electronic static fuzzing the edges of some irrelevant PSA—“This is an announcement from the New York Police Department”—out of such bedlam come the sounds of another subterranean monster. Its lights glow in the distance. The columns separating the tracks break up the scene, like the edges of film frames flickering across a screen. Your train and this other train are edging closer, smoothly eating up the distance between them, looking like they will converge into one.

Then the tracks straighten out. The trains run parallel, two bits of flotsam in the same current.

This is my favorite subway moment: when you can look out the window and see, two meters from your face, a familiar, commonplace and utterly untouchable tableau, a scene that can never be rewound or replayed. A single-run performance in the darkened theater of the tunnels. The train car opposite is exactly the same as the one you’re in yourself, but it never seems that way: somehow that other car always has a homey air, a comforting quality of light, a reassuring calmness and quiet. It’s like looking into a candlelit cottage from a snowy sidewalk and feeling a phantom warmth.

It’s all an illusion, of course. Those other commuters are only heading to their jobs in the morning and back home in the evening, and their subway cars are no cleaner and smell no better than your own. And yet something—the dense darkness in-between, perhaps, or the sepia tint from two thicknesses of old glass—makes that other scene inescapably evocative and unerringly superior.

And there is something compelling in such a moment of unconsummated closeness. You can always run back after somebody you pass on the street, but you’ll never again find that person you locked gazes with across that unbridgeable underground gap. She’s an express train on the E line, and you’re a local R, and your parallel tracks might as well be parallel universes—no crossing over allowed.

Maybe in Hollywood: undoubtedly there has been a ridiculous romantic comedy about two unlikely strangers (she a hardened cynic, he a reckless dreamer) sharing a mutual glimpse through those two panes and, exactly ninety-seven minutes later, settling into each other’s arms at some unlikely locale—the top of a skyscraper overlooking the East River, or under the Brooklyn Bridge.

But that’s much too neat and cheap to be interesting.

Dragonfruit and sugarcane

2011-11-22T19:53:00.001-06:00

New York: the city of lights, of sounds, of dreams of the future and visions of the past, city of sewers and parks, of Walt Whitman and John Lennon and the Village Voice, of the Port Authority and Occupy Wall Street; the village of the Dutch and city of the world, an archipelago anchored to the mainland by a single poor peninsula but yearning, like the huddled masses called by its fabled statue, to breathe free.

All of that. But this post is about Elmhurst.

I returned from Asia only to find another Asia, my little neighborhood enclave of Filipinos and Chinese, of restaurants festooned in Korean characters and cutesy cartoon manga, Vietnamese banh mi and ca phe sua da and green and red and Panang curries, two pho joints nearly side-by-side and identical which I compare and contrast even though, in truth, I can’t tell the difference between their rich broths and slippery-splashy rice noodles and cilantro sprigs and the fresh bean sprouts that crunch crisply between my teeth.

Through my window, along with the morning sun, floats the warbly Chinese crooning accompanying the housewives’ daily synchronized calisthenics in Moore Homestead Park. (They are dedicated up to a point: on particularly cold mornings their numbers are noticeably diminished.) At one vertex of the park’s triangle, New York Supermarket and Hong Kong Supermarket compete for the same block. Like Pho Bac and Pho Bang, they are the same entity in slightly different garb.

Along the main street are smaller markets with fruits lined up outside in a way that reminds me—unavoidably, nostalgia-bubblingly, heart-wrenchingly—of the Philippines. There are the mangoes I once ate with relish (marked up several hundred percent and sporting a sprinkling of black blemishes courtesy of the journey from their tropical home, wherever they were planted and plucked). There the pomelo, the papaya, the indigo sugarcane I watched growing, falling in harvest, and burning in sacrifice to the field-gods of Negros Occidental.

It’s a crossroads, Elmhurst, not a translocation of my Peace Corps haunts; a Hong Kongtown, not a Little Manila. We never had dragonfruit in Iloilo, and the smattering of languages I hear on the sidewalks is marvelously incomprehensible to me—for every snatch of Taglish there are dialogues in languages that have never known the Latin alphabet except as a crude phonetic crutch. Hearing everything, understanding little, I listen to dramas unfold in such a swirl of accents that I’m sure everything is happening here, now, in this pocket of Queens miles and mindsets away from the palace-complex of Manhattan and its royal hordes of caffeined drones.

Coffee in, cash out.

Java Village, Sugar Club, Hulu and Joju and Quickly, Glober Market—the stereotypically- and hilariously-misnamed grocery that causes me amusement and politically-correct guilt in equal measures—First Taste Bakery and Winners Bar and Ploy Thai, Chao Thai, Boon Chu Thai, the food stalls that have no names and no advertisements except the ones wafting from their fryers and ovens and stovetops and coffeepots, halal groceries and churros, a long thrumming boulevard of Asia and the Middle East and Latin America along a street called Broadway.

I am biased, of course, but in my mind this is the real Broadway—not that tart-of-a-street in Manhattan with its gaudy jewelry shops and chain stores and $60 live movies and the shameless, matching-t-shirted shills begging bedazzled tourists to come to tonight’s comedy show somewhere on Times Square, the world’s flashiest bordello.

My Broadway is quieter. Slower. It isn’t even very broad at all, though it spans multitudes. And unlike Manhattan’s harlot, my Broadway still has hiya. Hiya and a sense of self.

One day I stepped out onto the sidewalk and was met by a thick coverlet of red and yellow: it was as if
every tree in the park had decided to drop its leaves overnight, to blanket the sidewalk against the gathering winter. On that quilted battlefield, old men growled over their xiangqi boards—a vision from Guangzhou, where I watched such city-park commanders marshal their wooden soldiers exactly so almost precisely one year ago. Their speech was the same as their compatriots’ in China. Their body language was the same. For all I know, their diets and daily routines and sensibilities were the same. And this is America?

Yes.

October Chill

2011-11-13T17:17:00.001-06:00

I mostly receive expressions of sympathy, and sometimes of alarm, when I tell New Yorkers that I’ve never been through a real winter.

“Oh,” they say, looking me up and down, eyeballing my wardrobe and estimating fat thickness. “Do you have winter clothes?”

“I’ll get some,” I assure them cheerily, not bothering to admit that I am in fact already wearing what I consider my winter clothes – jacket, shoes, and a hat when it really gets nippy. Which it hasn’t, not by New York standards, though my Mississippi-California-Philippines background has established a rather different set of definitions.

So I found myself stumbling through the winter’s first snow two weeks ago, wet and cold from the slushy mess sweeping down Seventh Avenue. I had spent most of the day staring out of the windows of the bookstore, transfixed by this small amount of snow that quickly eclipsed the one significant snowfall of my youth (a sprinkling, but to us Gulf of Mexicans a blizzard). The bookstore was warm and homey, its soft lights inviting, and it felt like nothing so much as a well-kept cottage in some snow-swept northern village.

The snow wasn’t exactly piling up outside, but it wasn’t keen on leaving, either, so when my shift ended I slipped and slid up the sidewalk, angling for a warm café and hot coffee. Café Grumpy was packed: the stools were taken, the standing-room-only tables (another novelty to me—oh, brave new world with such a lack of seating) were surrounded by a collection of strangers smiling amicably or suspiciously (it’s hard to tell which, sometimes) above their cups, and there was only a narrow corridor between the counter and the dangerous gallery of caffeine fiends.

But the air was warm—warm enough to cover my glasses with a fine sheet of fog when I entered, and to generously apply new coats even as I wiped them clear. The girl at the counter wanted to know what I was having. I told her coffee. She asked what kind, pointing to the coffee menu, as if I was the kind of person to nitpick between Guatemalan and Costa Rican beans. (After due consideration and thoughtful lip-pursing I decided on the Costa Rican.) Without a place even to stand, I stumbled back out onto the sidewalk, clutching my coffee and relishing its warmth, especially when I slipped and it sprayed out onto my hands.

I went home and enjoyed the rest of the day’s snow from the vantage point of my bed, watching it swirl in the air above Moore Homestead Park and pile up on parked cars. It was a nasty, wet snow, and I had a soaking jacket to prove it, but it was also vaguely magical, and it reminded me unavoidably of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

The next day I bundled up and went exploring in the vast wilderness of Central Park, but first I stopped by Roosevelt Island, which I suppose is primarily known for lying between Long Island and Manhattan but being neither. It’s a slender spit of land shrugging off the East River to either side – from the center of the island I could see both channels – and providing a pleasant sense of calm before the mighty metal bulk of Manhattan. To my delight, there was a tram from the island into the city. (That’s how insular-minded New Yorkers can be – Manhattan is “the city,” and everything outside that compact space, even Brooklyn, is hinterland.) To my greater delight, it is part of the metro system and thus required nothing more than a swipe of my trusty card.

The tram car rose alongside the Queens bridge, providing nice views of the south end of Roosevelt Island, the Queens coastline and Manhattan’s saucy curves. We docked after far too short a time, and I took off for the park.

Snow still nestled in the park’s niches, in the cool spaces shaded by trees or hills, though the temperature had jumped up above freezing and the sun was blazing from a clear blue sky. The trees hadn’t yet lost their leaves – this was the earliest snow in many years – and the snowflakes, so delicate individually, had piled onto the greenery, snapping and toppling limbs across the paths. Apparently nature hadn’t yet prepared for itself.

Even in the great frozen North, October snow is an ephemeral thing, and it was dripping away into the park’s hollows as I emerged onto Seventh Avenue. It was a lovely Sunday even without the diminishing carpet of snow, and hordes of people were taking advantage of the open skies and bright sunshine.

The day was following the pattern of the previous day: go outside, get cold, buy coffee. But before I put away my camera and sought refuge in a darkened café, I caught one last scene: a man with a telescoping lens reclining in the shadow of a cathedral, snapping away at an elderly headscarfed woman resting on the church steps. I caught the man as he caught the woman, and the only thing missing was a camera in her hands, pointed at me, to complete an absurd triangle.

Coney Island, maybe

2011-10-22T21:16:00.000-05:00

Aside from the maddening carnival-music-loop droning from one of its beachside amusement parks, Coney Island on a Sunday in mid-October was almost the opposite of its own lore. The boardwalk, particularly at its western extremity, was quiet and desolate. A stiff wind blew clouds of sand in from the beach. Now and then a headbanded jogger puffed by, blinking the grit out of squinted eyes.

Coney Island is a far jaunt from Queens, thanks to the dearth of trains connecting my borough with Brooklyn. I rode the F train the whole way, rumbling west under Roosevelt Island, making the familiar dip into midtown and then looping back onto Long Island. The car emptied steadily: Manhattan ate most of the riders, and the remainder trickled off as we approached the beach. My last companion exited at the stop before mine, and I was all alone for the final few hundred meters.

The Coney Island crowds that pack the beaches during the summer – I’ve seen them on postcards from the 1930s, so I knew they must exist – had gone into their long hibernation, and aside from the joggers and a duo of windsurfers carving the brisk waves, I pretty much had the run of the west end. It was chilly and clear, a gorgeous day, perfect for a ramble.

As I walked east towards Brighton Beach, I saw more signs of life: parents pushing strollers, fishermen dotting the pier, and two hairy, ancient curmudgeons in suspiciously thong-like attire sunning themselves and commenting on the procession of passersby, as they had done every Sunday for the past hundred years or so.

The famous parks were at low capacity, despite the halfhearted spiderwebs strung across entryways to capitalize on the Halloween season. In lieu of rickety old rollercoasters and greasy carnival lumps, people swaddled in their brunch suits ordered pre-fixe meals at boardwalk cafes. (Forget the etymological implications: “brunch” here apparently means any Sunday meal before nightfall, though I suspect a particularly determined pack of brunchers could easily extend their gathering beyond midnight, subsisting entirely on bruschetta bites and celebrity gossip from the week previous.)

It may be far removed from its heyday, but like any storied place, Coney Island retains traces of its ancestry. The big red Parachute Jump, a carnival ride long out of commission, still towers over the boardwalk. It resembles a monstrous sprinkler head poking out of the wooden lawn, but whatever craziness it once sprayed has long dried up.

But I bet those two old curmudgeons remember it all.

Occupy Wall Street, occupy the world

2011-10-16T20:24:00.001-05:00

“Are you press?”

I couldn’t tell if the man was wary or excited by the prospect. I had just taken a picture of his little daughter. Amid the slow-moving ocean of protesters, gawkers, cops, journalists, and a couple of girls very keen to make it across Times Square to the Best Buy, she was balanced on his shoulders, bearing a sign calling for a books-not-bombs fiscal policy.

I assured the man that I wasn’t the press, though even as I was saying it I wondered what that word even meant anymore. The Occupy Wall Street protests have been documented far more comprehensively by amateurs, including the protesters themselves, than by the mainstream media.

That seems to be changing rapidly now as the protests gain steam in New York, Boston, London, Rome and many other cities. The loosely-affiliated protests have their own particular goals – Tokyo protesters, with the memories of Fukushima still fresh, have united against nuclear energy – but they are all flames from the spark struck by the bands of campers who converged on Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan on September 17.

Those bands have expanded, diversified and coalesced. There were still drum circles here and there, and some rattling strings of hippie beads, but the crowd I fought through at Times Square was well-stocked with our society’s odd symbols of respectability – sculpted coifs, shiny trinkets, stiff white collars and black suit jackets and uncomfortable shoes. Retired schoolteachers raised banners alongside youthful longhairs; the mouths beneath trendy berets and traditional hijab chanted together.

Most of the media focus, unfortunately, has been on the loudest and most absurd individuals: the bedecked, the painted, those with the golden vocal cords, and especially the idiots wearing 2011’s misunderstood pop-protest accessory of choice, the Guy Fawkes mask. They make for the finest objects of ridicule, but they are also the minority. The protest crew, however it may have started, now truly spans an impressive spectrum.

Indeed, the outcry against the protesters seems to be much more homogeneous than the protesting group itself. Without exception, every negative remark I’ve personally heard about the OWS folk – and working both in midtown and in the West Village, New York’s centers of wealth and bohemian gentrification respectively, I’ve heard a few – has come from someone displaying the nonchalant accoutrements of wealth, as well as a conspicuous deficiency of melanin. If anyone can pull off a respectable “trust-fund baby” crack, it’s not going to be a wealthy white retiree taking a post-brunch ramble along West 10th with her identical girlfriend.

No doubt the Times Square gathering prodded some to annoyance, as the east side of the plaza became almost impassible between 43rd and 44th. (In my opinion, it was quite an improvement over the hordes of tourists who normally reigned over the square.) Under the gaudy lights of the most-visited attraction on earth, the center of the center of the world, thousands of people screamed their slogans to the skyscrapers.
Being heard is no longer the problem; that phase is over. And whatever comes next, that in itself is a mighty accomplishment.

Wall Street’s Day of Irritation

2011-09-18T20:05:00.002-05:00

Like the two photos above, September 17’s “Day of Rage” in lower Manhattan sent mixed messages. Inspired by this year’s protests in the Middle East and northern Africa, and named after Chicago’s Days of Rage activities in the late 1960s, Saturday’s activism was… well…

What was it, exactly?

It was a call for the end of unlimited political campaign contributions. It was an indictment of government overextension – and a protest against NYC budget cuts. Marchers called for the fair treatment of Troy Davis and Bradley Manning. “Ron Paul 2012” banners flew comfortably next to signs calling that very same politician a lunatic. The Day of Rage was a lot of things.

One thing it wasn’t: a snapshot of the American political landscape. It was more of a mosaic, a colorful collection of sincere and distinctly conflicting viewpoints converging against the verdure of Bowling Green Park. (Wall Street, the intended venue, had already been fenced off by an anxious NYPD.)

Activities were as varied as the signs protesters held up to passing tour buses. Attendees held yoga sessions on the grass; marchers paced purposefully (that is, each to his or her own purpose) around the iconic Wall Street Bull; people strummed guitars, held forth on economic policy to anyone willing to listen, or just sat, smoked and took it all in. Many of those on the green, myself included, mingled primarily for photos and interviews.

The people I talked to couldn’t really explain what the protest was about. One boy, come down from Boston with his father for the event, explained patiently to me that this was by design – that the call to commune in Manhattan that day was only the beginning of the process. Protesters were due to hash out their message in “town hall” meetings over the course of the day; the product of these meetings would become their formal demand.

They’re in no hurry: despite the “Day of Rage” moniker, the protests are actually intended to extend for days, weeks or even months. When internet organizers called for attendees to “Occupy Wall Street,” they meant it literally, and some protesters insist that they’re in it for the long haul.

Despite the yoga, emotions were running high on Saturday. When the police began lining up metal fences around the northern tip of Bowling Green, protesters jeered at their “freedom pens,” claiming they were being unfairly contained. As the mass of protesters gradually migrated to the more spacious south end, I perched on the steps of the National Museum of the American Indian, snapping pictures of the crowds in the plaza below. A man nearby, clad in proud tie-dye and waving a “Veterans for Peace” banner, affably discussed the protest with me.

But when a policeman approached the steps where we stood and demanded that the man move down to the plaza – apparently his banner was an illegal instrument on the museum steps – he lashed out angrily, screaming about his service to his country in Vietnam and his right to protest just where he wanted. At his outburst the entire crowd in the park swiveled as one and gazed up at the steps, and suddenly my little patch of land was center stage. I sidled off to the side as cameras clicked and the Vietnam vet raged on, arm extended, blessing the attendant crowd with a classic peace sign.

He soon relinquished his spot to a preacher clad in dove-white and possessed of a practiced tongue. “We are a century storm,” he bellowed through a megaphone. “We are waking up… we will risk it all – amen!”

And the crowds screamed “Amen!”

What they were agreeing to with such religious zeal, probably nobody really knew then. Perhaps they know now, or will know in the days to come. Perhaps the Manhattan occupation will come to something in the end. I guess we’’ll know for sure if Troy Davis is freed, or if corporations are limited in their campaign contributions. Or if Ron Paul is elected.

Or, you know, if he’s not.

Pebbles on a mountain

2011-02-13T19:21:00.001-06:00

(Above) This is where I traveled.

(Below) For some perspective…

It’s a big world.

Five Vietnam: Hanoi and the End

2011-02-08T15:51:00.000-06:00

Hanoi’s Old Quarter is tiny streets and miniscule alleys packed with sellers of all things, from vegetables to headstones. The roads have baffling twists and mysterious termini: you may round a corner and have a beautiful lake filling your view, or you might find yourself on the doorstep of Kentucky Fried Chicken. In sheer numbers, the bodies and machines filling the streets can’t match Ho Chi Minh’s frenzies, but Hanoi’s more constricted environment makes every road crossing or packed sidewalk an obstacle course.

The Quarter certainly does feel old. Beautiful aged buildings are everywhere, and traditional markets line some of the winding alleyways. While it’s also the hub for budget-minded tourists, most of the locals – except for the ones catering directly to foreigners – go about their business without so much as a glance at the intruders.

Preparations for Tet were in full swing: everywhere I saw people carrying huge bunches of flowers, and orange trees – apparently a common gift and decoration – filled up Hanoi’s parks. Unfortunately, my flight was on the morning of February 2, the eve of Tet, so I didn’t get to experience the New Year in Vietnam. When the day turned I was somewhere in the air between Guangzhou, China and Los Angeles.

The energy of the Old Quarter was undoubtedly my favorite aspect of Hanoi. It could get exhausting – but then, it felt like a place that should be exhausting. At the same time, greater Hanoi was an attractive, park-spotted city, well-oriented for rambling. One afternoon – after failing to see the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, which was apparently open only in the morning – I took some back alleys, the kind to which you’re never quite sure there’s an exit until you hear the traffic from a real road up ahead. I ended up at a large pond entirely surrounded by multistory buildings, with entrances only large enough for motorbikes. Along one side of this pond was a long wall separating the walkway from a row of apartments; smack in the middle of this wall, a mirror reflected a man’s half-shaved face and his engrossed barber.

I was definitely struck with a sense of last-chance-to-see, since Hanoi was my ultimate stop. This gave me the odd idea that I should be doing something in particular to mark my final days in Asia – seeing some famous sight or throwing major dong at a special meal. But I realized that nothing would be more appropriate for the end of my trip than simply looking and listening. With rare exceptions, I never set out for a place with specific intentions, and usually I’ll gladly take aimlessness over an itinerary.

So I looked: at joggers around Hoan Kiem Lake, women washing dishes in buckets on the sidewalks, people taking in laundry under the sullen grey skies. I listened: to the chatter of men in the coffee-drinking circles, the admonitions of mothers to their children, and the insistent hum of engines. Everything ordinary – that’s what I wanted for my last couple days.

Fittingly, my grand exit was more of a sneaking crawl under cover of darkness. I woke up before 5am, when the streets were miraculously quiet, and tiptoed downstairs to shake the hotel proprietress awake so she could unlock the doors. She was sleeping peacefully on the lobby couch, protected from the chill by a thick sleeping bag. After clearing my throat ineffectually, I reached out and tentatively applied the smallest touch to her ankle region. I did this probably half a dozen times, increasing the pressure almost imperceptibly each time, before she woke and sat up blearily. I felt terrible. I had told her the day before that I had to check out early, but that fact assuaged my guilt not at all – especially since she and her husband had been extremely kind and helpful during my short stay.

“Did you pay?” she asked, rummaging around for my passport. “Yes, last night. I paid the older woman. Your mother?” I guessed. “Older woman?” She seemed confused, but let it pass, and finally handed over my passport and opened the doors, shivering as the chill cut through her pajamas.

“Thank you so much,” I said guiltily. She smiled slightly.

“And Happy New Year."

I walked the dark, empty streets to my airport shuttle. I sat in the cold airport. Boarded the plane. We took off.

Four Vietnam: Drops of Hue

2011-02-05T18:43:00.000-06:00

In Hue it rained, and most of what I saw was filtered through a café window. I never had to brave any downpours; instead the clouds decided to drip just enough to discourage too much exploring. I embarked on two expeditions to the Citadel, Hue’s old walled imperial city, and turned back both times. (This was due to a combination of rain and a general lack of interest in seeing the country’s tallest flagpole – which I was able to glimpse from afar, in any case.) I did enjoy walking along the banks of the Perfume River, a wide expanse blanketed in mist and dotted with colorful tourist boats, but the raindrops made me pay for the sight.

So really, I didn’t do much in Hue. I sat down with endless cups of Vietnamese coffee and wrote in my journal and read Banana Yoshimoto’s N.P. I tried to stay warm. I ignored the sounds filtering through the inexplicable window that linked my bathroom to the hotel room next door. Pretty soon it was time to go, and with a handful of peanuts and a squished butter cake (a gift from Hai) to sustain me, I boarded my last bus. My final stop was that fabled capital of old Indochina, city of lakes and temples: Hanoi.

Three Vietnam: Finding Luck in Hoi An

2011-02-04T10:50:00.000-06:00

In keeping with my belief that unplanned travel is often the best, Hoi An ended up being one of my favorite stops. I forfeited the remainder of my ongoing ticket to Hue, but a new ticket for the next day was only about 3USD and the extra was worth it.

Hoi An’s primary tourist attraction held no interest for me whatsoever: the town is known for its tailors, and clothing shops abound. One store proudly displayed a letter from a foreign customer who, along with his wife, ended up buying somewhere north of sixty clothing items during their stay. Unfathomable. Perhaps more than any other place I went in Vietnam – where tourists were in general easily found – the foreign contingent in Hoi An asserted itself with a kind of selective interest: I saw almost no foreigners outside of a half-dozen or so streets that form the town’s core. I was also greatly amused when I came upon a Highly Interesting Cultural Event being held on a sidewalk – some locals burning trash. Two separate international types were videotaping this while the Vietnamese laughed at them.

What I really liked about Hoi An was the river, which was green and sluggish, and the buildings, which were yellowed and old. The river flows alongside the Ancient Town, a collection of narrow streets and alleyways that harbor the typical tourist requisites along with many, many cafes. My favorite part of my brief stay was walking these streets and talking with the local artists about their work. There were several photography galleries as well, mostly displaying the output of a local photo club.

As always, there were also lots of people angling for foreign dollars. I’ve found it pretty easy to turn down overpriced trinkets and vegetables and motorbike rides, but I was willfully suckered in Hoi An by Dao and Tuan, a couple of shrewd kids who insisted that I needed to buy a buffalo zodiac pendant for luck. (Apparently the Vietnamese substitute a water buffalo for the ox of the Chinese zodiac.) I got them to cut their price by two-thirds but knew I was still getting swindled – especially after, realizing they were out of buffalo, big sister Dao handed Tuan a fraction of what I paid to go get me a buffalo pendant from some unnamed third party. I respected their polite tenacity and also appreciated their willingness to chat. I may have lost points with them when I tied the buffalo to my wrist instead of around my neck, but after some consideration Dao decided that it would bring me luck nonetheless.

And now the bit about food. Thanks to an abundance of international restaurants I mostly ate western food in
Hoi An, and it was mostly good. I’ve talked about the coffee and the pho, but another thing I’ve loved about Vietnam is the crusty baguettes that are frequently served with meals. It’s something I only recently realized that I really miss from back home.

More than anything, Hoi An was simply picturesque. As I moved through Vietnam I saw more and more preparations being made for the February 3 Tet holiday, and Hoi An was in full swing: altars bearing food and incense were being set up along the sidewalks, red banners and decorations adorned many of the cracked walls in the Ancient City, and dragons were in conspicuous attendance. All of these preparations were set against a town that, while catering to tourists, still managed to maintain its own separate spirit. The morning before I left, I was out early on the streets watching worn old women carry impressive loads of bananas and peppers on their backs. A girl stepped out of her shop and performed a brief, private ritual with sticks of incense. And the fog rolled on the river.

Compared to the rest of my bus trips, the hop to Hue was brief – only four hours – but it gave me my best look at Vietnam’s countryside. This was because, for unclear reasons, the driver yanked me out of my seat halfway through and made me sit on a fold-out chair right at the front of the bus. (I think my booking agency screwed up my ticket, and as a result I had to forfeit my seat to someone else.) This ended up being great for me because I had more leg room, more fresh air and the best view of anyone. Some of this view was Da Nang’s ugly urban sprawl and some of it was the feeble walls set up by developers building resorts on fabled China Beach – I had at one point considered going to China Beach, and this ride made me glad I didn’t – but we also rode through rather beautiful mountain passes and valleys.

I also had the pleasure of watching the bus driver threaten to toss off a group of young Vietnamese men who had gotten a bit too rowdy. He literally turned off the highway, stopped the bus and turned around to chew them out. It was fantastic.

Throughout it all, drizzle plunked down onto the windshield. Since Ho Chi Minh I had been hoping for a respite from the grey weather, but I wasn’t getting it now… and I wouldn’t get it in Hue.

Two Vietnam: Grey Skies Over Nha Trang

2011-01-31T06:19:00.000-06:00

It was on my bus out of Ho Chi Minh that I realized I had been living on a relatively small island for the past two years. The bus just kept going and going and never seemed to be going anywhere; it took us thirteen hours and around 450 kilometers to reach Nha Trang, and I kept thinking… where’s the water? Are we going in circles? On Panay Island, where I lived in the Philippines, 450 kilometers would have been sufficient to cross the entire landmass several times over. In fact, a list of land-routes in the Philippines exceeding 450 kilometers would be short indeed – crossing Luzon north-south and Mindanao both ways, and that’s about it.

This was my first “sleeper bus,” though it was a day trip and I didn’t sleep. These buses basically have seats that recline almost to horizontal, which is great, but there’s no place to put luggage, which is not. Everything has to go in the compartment under the bus or, if you must carry it on, behind your seat… which prevents it from reclining all the way. I had my laptop and camera in my backpack, so I wasn’t about to let it leave my sight.

Even so, the sleeper buses are more comfortable than regular ones for long trips. I would much rather have taken a train, but I managed to time my trip to coincide perfectly with the two weeks before Tet, when Vietnamese all over the country are returning home to celebrate the holiday. The tourist scene has been relatively tame – I’ve had no problems at all finding accommodation and frequently I’ve been stuck with half a dozen restaurant staff staring at me as I eat, being the only patron in the place – but transportation has been a touch more complicated. I had hoped to ride some trains in Vietnam, but they seem to have been booked solid for weeks.

So buses it has been. I would say my sleeper buses (which cater to tourists) have been roughly two-thirds foreigners and one-third Vietnamese. I was seated next to one of the latter group for much of my trip to Nha Trang. We attempted to converse, and after a lot of scribbled notes and gesticulating we were still a long way from understanding each other, but it was an enjoyable way to spend several hours. Hai was a college student in Ho Chi Minh returning to her home in Phan Rang for either the weekend or the holiday. She asked me to help her with English, which I did awkwardly and inefficiently, and in return she taught me some Vietnamese phrases that I still can’t pronounce. We shared some food and laughed together at the sleeping Russian kid next to me – his tongue lolling and eyes rolling – and she made the usual comments about my hair.

Nha Trang itself was different from what I’d expected, probably because the only really developed beach-resort-area I’d been to in Asia was Boracay. Boracay was a beach, with lots of hotels and resorts and restaurants and stalls thrown directly onto that beach. Nha Trang seems much more intentional: the beach is contiguous with a substantial city, but most of the structures are built off the beach itself and separated from the sand by a road. And the beach is more park-ish, with walking paths and playgrounds and whatnot.

The place was less raucous than I was led to believe – no doubt thanks to the time of year; Nha Trang certainly contained enough tourist infrastructure to host a Little Paris, Germantown and other suchlike transient international communities – and I saw nary a patch of blue sky during my entire stay. That was fine – it never got too cold, and the ocean was pretty in the greyness even if I didn’t swim in it. Mostly what I did in Nha Trang (this is going to become a tiresome refrain, I’m afraid) was eat.

I stayed four nights – I hung about for a long time here because I wanted to relax and recover from a lingering illness – and I managed to avoid ever going to the same restaurant twice. Including coffee breaks and dessert stops, I probably hit at least twenty-five cafes during my time there, and almost all the food was good. Actually, the only thing that disappointed me was the pho, which was much inferior to what I had gotten in Saigon.

I did explore the town to some extent and found some lovely winding back alleys. I was a bit skeptical as always about the foreigner-friendly market with its brand-name t-shirts. Sure, there were also rows of bottled and preserved scorpions for sale, but in context they seemed about as exotic as jars of pickles at a grocery store.

On a positive note, I also visited a photography gallery exhibiting the work of a local Vietnamese artist named Long Thanh. It was marvelous. His photos – which he takes on black-and-white film and develops himself – are stunning scenes of daily life in Vietnam. They’re exactly the kind of photos I admire most: the kind that recognizes the beauty in something mundane – the kind that shows the photographer’s love and admiration and respect for his subjects.

My next destination was Hue, but I didn’t make it to Hue. After twelve hours or so on the road, we had to switch buses for the last stretch. As I and my fellow passengers stood in the drowsy early-morning air, waiting for the pickup, I looked around at the pleasantly old buildings and and thought… Actually, this looks good. And so I trudged off to find a place to stay for one night in Hoi An.

One Vietnam: Café Saigon

2011-01-27T18:54:00.000-06:00

The inescapable thing about Ho Chi Minh is the motorbikes. Every light change unleashes a flood – a deluge – of humming bikes, flowing three or four to a lane. Riders clutch bags, bunches of vegetables and small children as their mounts tilt and buck. Crossing streets in Ho Chi Minh (which is still often referred to as “Saigon”) requires a little bit of courage and a large amount of faith, but the effort is paid off by the magical feeling of deadly metal machines speeding inches from your body and the conviction that you could sit down and host a picnic in the middle of the highway without getting nicked by the skillful drivers. I saw people drop things from bikes, I saw them leaning at impossible angles, but I knew I’d never see one fall.

And technically I didn’t. But my bus out of Ho Chi Minh slowed at a bottleneck caused by a twisted, ruined bike lying meters from a white-sheet-covered lump. Bright red blood was seeping out from under the sheet as gawkers on the street and in passing vehicles stared.

But in my personal experience, bikes will, with a minimum of fuss, swarm around pedestrians like ants skirting a puddle. What makes these scenes more striking is the sheer dominance of motorbikes as the preferred mode of transport; Manila’s traffic may have been just as chaotic, but its mix of jeepneys, motorbikes, tricycles, pedicabs, buses and private vehicles gave it a fitfully competitive atmosphere. In Ho Chi Minh, the bikes at times almost seemed to be running on rails and according to timetables.

I didn’t get to witness this spectacle immediately because I arrived from Manila some few minutes after midnight, when the streets were quieter. As usual I had nothing booked in advance, my only guide being the words “Pham Ngu Lao (budget hostels)” scribbled on the back of an ATM receipt. Pham Ngu Lao was the section of town where one could, or so I had read, find cheap accommodation. I didn’t know where it was and I wasn’t even very confident about its pronunciation.

This did not go over well with the Chinese-Filipino student with whom I shared a cab. (He had approached me with the ride-sharing suggestion at the currency-exchange desk of the airport. I suppose I was the least-threatening traveler on his flight.) We made small talk during the ride and he (rather nervously, I thought) pointed out the hammer-and-sickle insignia that adorned walls and signs along the sidewalks. Maybe he thought I was a little bit cracked to be wandering communist Vietnam’s largest city after midnight without any kind of plans, but – in Pham Ngu Lao, at least – this seemed to be rather the norm.

I dropped into bed, exhausted, as soon as I found a hotel with somewhat reasonable rates. In mid-morning I got up, left my hotel, and started eating. I haven’t stopped yet.

My first meal in Vietnam was, probably, the best pho bo I’ve ever eaten. Now, this was in a highly-touristed area and I make no claims as to its legitimacy as Vietnamese cuisine, but from that point on I craved the beef noodle soup at least a little every day. In form it was similar to pho I’ve had in the US and the Philippines – broth with rice noodles, onions, cilantro, bean sprouts, lime and cuts of beef – the main difference being that the broth was much richer than I’d tasted before. I had to force myself to eat other things. Luckily, nearly everything I’ve eaten in Vietnam has been either delicious or really delicious. The highlights from Ho Chi Minh were crispy fried Vietnamese noodles and ostrich steak. And oh, the coffee…

I’d never before liked Vietnamese coffee, which in its typical form in the US and the Philippines is a sickly orange mix of condensed milk and a bit of coffee, sweetened to candy-like proportions. Well, in Vietnam I’ve had coffee every day, and usually two or three times. The coffee is usually served sweet, but I hesitate to just call it “sweet coffee” because that implies (to my mind) an entirely different taste. Suffice it to say that I’ve never had coffee like it before, and that has been my loss. It’s thick and strong, cheap (a small glass in a little local cafe is generally about .50USD) and especially good iced.

I did things other than eating in Ho Chi Minh, though they were rather minor in comparison. I visited the War Remnants Museum, which is essentially an account of the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Its displays are suitably graphic – photographs of dead soldiers and dying non-combatants, preserved fetuses deformed by chemical attacks, recovered guns and burst shells. Many of the war’s iconic photographs are on display, including perhaps the two most well-known of all: Phan Thị Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack, and the execution of Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem.

I also had some happy reminders of the Philippines. Four times in Ho Chi Minh I was stopped by people commenting on my curly hair, and – I thought this was so strange – three of those times the commentators were Filipino. Each time we had a lively conversation about Philippine dialects and food – “And menudo? Caldereta? Tortang talong, you know that?” – and I duly expressed my admiration for their country and how much I missed it already.

Although my time in Ho Chi Minh was interesting, I was really looking forward to some time away from big cities. After all, since I finished my Peace Corps service in November I had been through Manila, Osaka, Tokyo, Shanghai, Xi’an, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong – all middling-to-huge metropolises. My first choice was Quy Nhon, a midsized and supposedly laid-back beach community about a third of the way up Vietnam’s coast, but a long and confusing discussion with my hotel’s booking desk revealed that all the trains were full and the buses were too. (I’m not exactly sure that this was, in fact, the conclusion, but after running around in some half-English circles, we definitely weren’t getting anywhere.) The conversation turned inevitably towards another beach community, one not as far as Quy Nhon and much more popular. I reluctantly bought the ticket for a sleeper bus, telling myself that no matter how tourist-infested the place was, I would at least have a pretty beach at my disposal. And my fate was set: I was going to Nha Trang.

Red sky Boracay

2011-01-24T18:49:00.000-06:00

Last year I passed into the New Year in Boracay; this time around I gave the holiday a miss and came a few days afterwards. (Thus avoiding “super-peak season” prices.) There’s little to be said about Boracay that hasn’t been said before – or, more specifically, that I haven’t said before. Since my site was only a few hours from the island, and since some travelers used Iloilo City as the entrypoint to Boracay, I’ve said a lot about it. It’s too crowded. Too commercial. Too much of a non-Filipino enclave.

But it does have a pretty beach and good food and, like all beaches in the Philippines seem to do, it faces west.

Boracay is at its best when sun, sand and waves are all that exist – or when they are complemented by young locals placing their carefully lighted candles into sand lanterns, or busily shuttling cockroach passengers along the beach in toy cars. There’s a lot of ugliness on the island, but it still shines on occasion.

I knew this second goodbye to the Philippines would be more definite – I won’t be making another trip there anytime soon, though I certainly hope to get back someday. This time, unlike in November, I had a ticket back to the US. But I still had two weeks before I would be making that last series of flights home. In the meantime, I had one last country to explore, and a little after midnight on January 20 I touched down in Ho Chi Minh City to begin a long crawl up Vietnam’s coast.

I went back to the Philippines

2011-01-18T19:25:00.000-06:00

Filipinos have a well-worn repertoire of national Sights and Spectacles to recommend to visitors. There’s Boracay, of course, the country’s dominant party beach; the Chocolate Hills of Bohol, a series of brown papillary bumps in the earth; the tarsiers, the world’s smallest primates, also found in Bohol; Palawan’s underground river. Many Filipinos have never visited some or any of these sights, but the list is pretty standard, and near the top of that list can usually be found the rice terraces of Banaue.

For me, the most striking thing about the rice terraces is not their appearance, impressive though they are, but rather their sheer antiquity. Some of the terraces have been maintained by Luzon’s Ifugao since long before such a people as “Filipinos” existed. And for all of modern society’s accoutrements, the terraces remain in use in communities far from any oceans, cities or Jollibees. The finest terraces of them all (well, such is the general consensus) are etched into the mountainsides at Batad, which is a reached by a long trike ride and a longer hike from Banaue. Batad’s small local community caters to visitors with its many simple guesthouses, and foreigners are no odd sight – on our hike in, many of the locals we passed asked in proficient English if we needed guides or lodging in the town.

The truth is that, while the terraces are worth seeing, I was more interested in the mountain culture and the people who lived in what I thought of as an inhospitable place. Many of the trails are impassable by anything mechanical, and even on the well-worn road out of Banuae we witnessed a jeepney struggling through the mud mixed up by recent rains. (We also came upon a mysterious earth-mover digging out a hillside in a place where there seemed absolutely no way to way to get the huge machine there – the trails up and down the hill were far too steep and narrow. It looked like it had been airdropped by a truly monstrous helicopter.) Of course people there survive, working their terraces and housing and feeding curious outsiders, but their adaptations to life in and from the mountains must be marvelous to “urban” eyes. Even their bodies change: we saw that many locals had feet with remarkably splayed toes, tweaked to better navigate the mountain paths that wind around their valley.

I didn’t return to the Philippines a month after my service ended just to see the rice terraces, of course, but I liked the sidetrip. I enjoyed visiting Japan and China, but I discovered just how huge the difference is between traveling and living. Back in the Philippines I felt comfortable: I knew how to get around, I could communicate, I recognized a lot of the local quirks. The Philippines was my home for over two years, after all, which was not enough time for me to understand it, but it was enough for me to become comfortable with a lot of things that were initially jarring – and enough for me to welcome the sweet sounds of Ilonggo all over again.

I spent Christmas back at my center in Iloilo, after a harrowing ro-ro (roll-on, roll-off) trip from Manila involving three cramped bus journeys, two intemperate ferry jaunts and twenty-seven total hours. A few of my coworkers knew I was visiting, but it was a surprise for nearly all of my kids – and I was mobbed before I even got inside the center. It was fantastic to see them again, to go through our well-worn routines and conversations.

My third New Year in the Philippines turned, and this time I had a ticket home. But I wasn’t redeeming it quite yet.

Five China: Hong Kong Pinball

2011-01-09T17:23:00.000-06:00

Hong Kong’s neon arms might be open to foreigners and foreign investments, but I had more trouble getting through its gates than I did entering the red border via Shanghai. After a long wait in line, my immigration official took my passport and scanned it. And scanned it again. And a third time. She flipped through the pages, peered intently at my Chinese visa and frowned. A second official conferred with her and then called me out of the line. After asking me how I had gotten into China – apparently ferries are suspicious – she pointed out the smears on my passport and all was suddenly clear. Likely some ink had run during the rainy days in Japan and that was enough to throw my documents into doubt. But soon enough I was inside and on my way through yet another big city.

Actually, I stayed in two cities during my time in Hong Kong: one was Hong Kong itself, and one was Chungking Mansions, a sprawling global microcosm in the form of a single crumbling building on Nathan Road in Kowloon. Chungking Mansions does not exactly live up to its grandiose name, but its many budget guesthouses, food stalls, moneychangers and knockoff hawkers make it an interesting place to spend a night, to say the least. Aircon units stud its rusted façade like warts on a modern chimera.

I could find no desk or obvious check-in area at the first guesthouse I checked. I walked up and down the narrow hallways until a man stuck his head out of a room and asked, in some foreign accent, what I needed. I had no idea if he was officially connected to the guesthouse or not. He asked another random person in the hallway, who asserted that all the rooms were full; and so he walked me over to the next guesthouse, where again nobody was on duty. This one had a tiny desk and a telephone. He told me he thought room nine was empty. There was a phone number taped to the wall, and he dialed this to ask somebody – I imagined a suited, scarred figure lurking behind a desk somewhere in the basement – about vacancies. This absent person confirmed that room nine was available. My guide rummaged around in the desk – “I think the key is here” – and let me in, then told me “Okay, you just pay me now.” So I did.

This was my first private room since Kameido Weekly Mansion in Tokyo, and it came fully equipped with a TV, bathroom and even a window. I didn’t bother with the tiny television, but I thoroughly enjoyed the hot water in the slightly larger bathroom. The sink jutted out over the toilet and the shower implement knocked against the walls as I tried to maneuver it in the miniscule space. My window looked out over a dark, dirty alley and dozens of other windows just like mine. I only stayed Thursday night – my flight was early Saturday morning, and I didn’t want to blow the money to stay a partial night – and so I checked out on Friday and asked if I could leave my luggage there for the day. “Yes,” the surly clerk (there was a clerk this time) told me. I looked around for a luggage room or a desk big enough to hide my bag behind. There was nothing. The clerk glared at me under her brows. “Just here?” I asked, and she nodded like I was an idiot. So I dropped my bag in the middle of the hallway and left.

Kowloon was crazy in the way that only an international crossroads could be. I bounced around the streets like a human pinball, jostled by the frantic crowds. At first – thanks in no small part to a throbbing headache developed over the course of my two-hour train from Guangzhou – I hated it. Couldn’t wait to leave. But after checking in to my guesthouse and eating a delicious beef curry on a quieter sidestreet, I started to appreciate the pace and the crowds. My first afternoon and evening I spent roaming Kowloon’s streets and then rushing to the wharf to take pictures of a gorgeous sun setting behind Hong Kong Island’s skyline to the south.

Hong Kong is much bigger than most people, including me, probably imagine it. Most of the Special Administrative Region is green hills and undeveloped land; this, aside from my train ride in, I did not see. Kowloon is the district directly across the bay from Hong Kong “proper,” where most of the shiny stuff is. Kowloon is seedier and more interesting, but I also enjoyed boarding the venerable Star Ferry (which connects the Tsim Sha Tsui section of Kowloon with the Central District on Hong Kong Island) for a bumpy ride across the harbor that cost, in US dollars, about twenty-five cents. The metro also undercuts the harbor, but the Star Ferry is cheaper and more entertaining.

But Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway is itself world-renowned for its efficiency. It is indeed impressive – although really all the metro systems I rode in China and Japan were pretty swanky – and the second morning I rode it up north to have a look at the prior site of the Kowloon Walled City. It’s now a park, and a pretty one, but a few decades back the Walled City was infamous: it was formerly an army garrison that was later colonized by locals who flocked to the lawless community inside. Crime and poverty ran rampant through its labyrinthine streets, where dog-meat vendors sold their wares and unlicensed dentists ran their front-room clinics. (If there’s one thing that has become canon in the retelling of the City’s history, it is, for whatever reason, the unlicensed dentists.)

After the Walled City I took in Hong Kong Island. I took the Central to Mid-Levels Escalators – a crazy system of escalators that seems to run on forever, and then a littler further – to the SoHo section, where I had lunch in one of the dozens of little restaurants that line the steep streets. It was here that I made the decision to spend most of my wealth, if I ever amass any wealth, in the pursuit of food. Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Mediterranean, Italian, French, Lebanese, Japanese… just about every cuisine imaginable was represented on those hallowed lanes.

On my way back down from Mid-Levels, I strolled the little alleys of vendors selling antiques and vegetables. At ground level the scene was very different: the walls of skyscrapers rose all around, glinting in the afternoon sun, and pedestrians milled busily around the intricate footways built over, under and through the noisy streets.

I spent my second night holed up in a café on Nathan Road, watching the Friday crowds dance by and waiting for them to thin out. They never did. When I boarded the Airport Express around eleven pm, the streets were still thrumming.

China had one more surprise for me. My next country required an ongoing ticket for entry, and I had none. I hadn’t planned ahead that far. So I was told that I wouldn’t be able to board my plane without proof that I was leaving again. I decided to buy the cheapest ticket I could and just change it when I decided on my next destination – only to be told that the airport desk could only book me a return ticket to Hong Kong. With no feasible alternatives, I bought the most inexpensive return ticket I could find, knowing that I probably wouldn’t be using it at all.

I stepped on my plane and stepped off again two hours later. The moist, warm air, the crumbling streets, the smell of fumes… it all seemed so familiar. Soon my cab was skimming down Adriatico, my old landmarks flashing by in the early-morning gloom. I was back in Manila – back in the Philippines.

Four China: The Generals of Guangzhou

2011-01-02T19:40:00.000-06:00

War was everywhere I turned in Guangzhou. Grizzled men, their skins creased with the stresses of the military life, commanded their soldiers with flicks of their fingers, pondered and muttered strategies with their officers, and observed the triumphs and tragedies their decisions wrought. Their armies were small and smaller still were the consequences of their actions, but these chainsmoking generals moved their xiangqi disks with the gravity of true veterans.

But all this fighting took place in the most incongruous of locales: a quiet park in the polished downtown section of a modern Chinese city. Appearance-wise, Guangzhou outpaced the other Chinese cities I visited – its facades were spotless, its windows sparkling, and the signs proclaiming it the site of the 2010 Asian Games (and the ‘10 Asian Para Games as well) still reared their heads proudly. Away from the financial centers I could still find the homely and far more tolerable market streets filled with vendors selling tea and old electronics, but there was abundant evidence of the Rise of China in the city’s shiny pockets of prosperity.

One of these oases was Shamian Island, a former French/British concession on the Pearl River separated from the rest of the city by a tidal canal. Much like the formerly-French swathes of Shanghai, Shamian Island still retains many of its European-style buildings and, unfortunately, many of its Europeans (and Americans) as well. My hostel on Shamian was essentially a hotel that happened to have a dorm room, but by local standards it was at least cheap, though still twice as expensive as my most economical lodging in China. The island also had a range of food (I had a tasty Thai dinner one night) and lovely views across the Pearl River, where river cruises lighted the way across the water.

Foreign adoptions of Chinese orphans are also processed in Guangzhou, and so the area is rife with westerners. I’m going to harp on the negative aspects of expatriatism here and assert that, throughout my life in the Philippines and my travels in Japan and China, I never witnessed so much rudeness as on Shamian. Every time a foreigner treated a local with arrogance, impatience and condescension (this was the standard attitude towards waitresses in particular), I wanted to slink away in shame. I wanted to slink away a lot.

I did have a very positive cross-cultural experience on my train from Chongqing, however. Conducted with body language, very few English words and even fewer Chinese words, my interactions with country nationals in China (except for hostel staff, who spoke more English) were generally pretty shallow. On the way to Guangzhou, though, I got to know the slightly older Chinese man in the bunk across from mine. I never quite got Jean’s story straight – he either worked in Chongqing or studied there, he might have had family there as well but they may actually have lived in Guangzhou or somewhere in-between the two cities, and I had no idea why he was on the train to begin with. As he spoke English he struggled with words and choked on his pronunciation, obviously making a huge effort to talk to me, and I appreciated that effort tremendously.

Our conversation covered a wide range of subjects, from traveling (he was interested in my stories about the Philippines, though he didn’t know the country’s precise location) to the modernization of Japan. We also discussed literature. I impressed him by mentioning Li Bai; I was lucky that this discussion never got deeper than names because otherwise he wouldn’t have been impressed for long. I was amused that the Romanized name of the most famous Chinese figure in the west, Confucius, was totally unrecognizable to Jean. I managed to get close enough to the Chinese pronunciation, Kong zi, for him to know who I was talking about. Still I couldn’t help wondering: if the west managed to distort the guy’s name so thoroughly, what must we have done to his actual philosophy?

Jean also treated me to lunch (I didn’t order a meal, but when the cart was rolled out – surprise – there was an extra for me), and in return I gave him some American, Philippine and Japanese coins as keepsakes. He disembarked on the first night and we exchanged the usual platitudes about hoping to keep in touch. I don’t know if we will, but his email address is in my notebook along with the bewildering maze of strokes that makes up his Chinese name, so maybe it’ll happen. Or maybe not: there’s something appealing about train buddies, people who pop into your life for a set time and then disappear and leave you to wonder forever after what they’re up to and who they really are. They are Encounters, and some of the most interesting and rewarding parts of my life since I left the US (and even when I lived there) have been such Encounters.

I had a flight to catch, and as the days turned in Guangzhou my time in China was getting short. My next train ride was a short one, only two hours, but it would provide one of the greatest contrasts of my trip: it would take me from the leafy, quiet confines of Shamian Island to the mad streets of Hong Kong’s Kowloon, where the only thing brighter than the skyscrapers is the erratic neon.

Three China: Chongqing’s Rivers, Chongqing’s Hills

2010-12-28T22:46:00.000-06:00

When I arrive in a new place, I like to try to walk to wherever I’m spending the night. Long hikes from train stations and wharves might not be the most relaxing way to spend my first stretch of time in an unfamiliar locale, but it helps me learn how to get around. (Sometimes, as in Tokyo, I substitute metro trains for my feet. Learning the systems of public transit can often be just as rewarding and interesting as wandering through neighborhoods.)

Chongqing defeated me. After an undetermined amount of time trying to navigate its irregular roads, with thick fog obscuring any landmarks on the horizon, I gave up and hailed a taxi. It promptly turned back the way I had come.

It was a repetitive theme during my time in Chongqing, which is odd, considering that the area where I stayed was near downtown, somewhat close to a metro station and sandwiched between two rivers. Navigation should have been a snap. But in this city, where a third dimension is very much relevant, flat maps are only loose guides: roads that look like thoroughfares peter out after climbing up (and sometimes into) steep hills, roads wind around like paths in a labyrinth, and staircases shoot into the sky in surprising and (to this flatlander) distressing ways. Once I walked down the Jialing River’s bank, dipped into the interior looking for a nearby park, and after failing to find it, tried to retrace my steps. I ended up, disbelievingly at first, standing on a hill overlooking the Yangtze. I had traversed the Chongqing peninsula and ended up on the southern shore instead of the northern: in other words, I had managed to do everything perfectly, seamlessly wrong.

Luckily, getting things like this wrong doesn’t bother me much. It was Chongqing’s gridless, rambling quality that gave it more character than any of the other cities I saw in China: a neighborhood parking spot carved out of sheer mountain rock is always going to have more charm than a concrete parking garage. And the vistas were gorgeous, and gorgeously obscured by the constant fog rolling off the rivers. (I met a British traveler in my hostel – the Yangtze River Hostel – who arrived the day I left. I mentioned the beautiful view over the Jialing, and he told me matter-of-factly that he had checked the weather schedule and was waiting for the fog to subside before taking in the valleys. I had a momentary jolt of confusion: when I said the view was beautiful, I meant the fog.)

The city might be eminently picturesque, but it’s very far from idyllic. I’ve never before seen so much ongoing construction: half the streets remotely close to the city center seemed to support a complex ecosystem of cranes, scaffolding and builders scurrying about like worker ants. The metro system, which during my visit consisted of just one line (a lovely jaunt high above the Jialing’s shore), is being ambitiously expanded, and the empty, half-built tracks look ironically like shattered postapocalyptic remains. All this exists side-by-side with locals lugging huge baskets of goods up the steep grades.

This juxtaposition of the rural and urban was stronger in Chongqing than anywhere else I went. The city has the requisite modern core complete with cafes, upscale clothing boutiques and booksellers (like the Xinhua Bookstore, which organized its tomes into such categories as “Humorous Joke,” “The Foreign Chinese Uses the Book” and “Text Uses the Book Abundantly”), but rusticity is only a reasonable stroll from downtown. One day I took a vertical way up and around to cliffs adorned with huts, where I could see bridges crossing the Yangzte which disappeared into the haze before they reached the opposite shore. On my way down I walked through a market that squeezed through alleys and sprawled out onto sidewalks.

And my hostel, typically, was a mix as well. I had complimentary wifi in the lobby, but I was also given free “traditional Chinese medicine” by a concerned staff member after she heard my pathetic sniffling from an incipient cold. This was just one gracious act by the hostel staff, who quickly became my favorite hosts during my trip. Partly this was because, immediately upon my arrival, the girl checking me in had the charming audacity to compliment my Chinese intonation (which mostly consisted of the names of cities). As the check-in proceeded another staff member rounded the corner and stopped dead in her tracks, staring at my hair. “Wow, curly,” she said in English. “Is it natural?”

One day I had afternoon tea with the staff and we sipped from teacups the size of half-walnuts; another time I sought help in using a phone card I had purchased in Shanghai. The instructions were entirely in Chinese. The clerk took one look at the card and informed me that it only worked within Shanghai. “Disaster,” she added. I agreed. They took a genuine interest in their guests and had an easy, natural manner that made me a bit sad to leave after only two nights.

But leave I did. Sunday night I pulled on my jacket, grabbed my bags and wound my scarf. (This was gifted to me before I left the Philippines; it is not a “real” scarf, but something Filipinos use as a scarf. I could explain it further, but I think one of the Yangtze River Hostel staff put it most succinctly when, after I unwound it so she could see examine it, she nodded sagely: “Ah,” she said, “Tablecloth.”) I hopped into my second and last taxi – this one necessary due to distance, not navigational uncertainty – and arrived at the train station steeling myself for my longest trip yet.

It was two nights back to the coast, but fortified with convenience-store snacks (which did not include cucumber-flavored potato chips, which I bought for my first train ride and now consider to be my single greatest error), I settled in for the long haul to Guangzhou.

Two China: Xi’an Shenanigans

2010-12-26T17:19:00.001-06:00

My train is speeding through arid valleys of dry rice paddies and some dilapidated buildings and hardly any people. Industrial haze is settling into pockets on the horizon. (One thing for the pollution: it makes for great sunsets.) Here are the dirt-road villages, the tiny alleys, the never-ending dust – interspersed here and there with the ugly concrete edifices, factory smokestacks, and other blights of a modern kind.

Xi’an itself is a city seemingly on the edge of nothing, a place thrown up against wind-driven dirt, and yet it was once one of the most grandiose settlements in China. Remnants of the old Xi’an remain in the preserved walls that protect the inner city – walls which kept invaders out but, in another time, welcomed the Golden Arches of a different sort of empire. Broad thoroughfares line the perimeters of historical sites reached via underground pedestrian tunnels which, at the other end, spit tourists into the comforting arms of Starbucks.

To be fair, all of the places I visited during my trip through China – which inadvertently became a Big-City Tour – boasted considerable western trappings, and I did avail of them more frequently than I care to admit. (Especially after I discovered that ordering food in China, which lacks Japan’s ubiquitous picture-menus, is generally a stab in the dark.) And in Xi’an I also indulged in probably the single most touristy act during my travels so far: visiting the terracotta warrior army of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China.

Actually, the terracotta army itself, which was crafted in order to guard the emperor after his death, was more impressive than I expected. Two of the three publicly-viewable pits at the excavation site are huge, and it’s easy to get a sense of the statues’ considerable antiquity. Thankfully the site organizers have refrained from gumming up the pits with excessive displays. (The excessive displays are instead housed at a nearby museum, with entertaining English explanations like “Each statue is exquisitely and made in life-size” and “The area of the tombs is also considerable large.”)

The pits are worth seeing, but getting there requires navigating through a massive maze of replica-sellers, English guides (all of whom insist that you won’t understand anything at the site without their help) and ongoing construction that heralds even more replica-sellers and English guides. It is a miserable place, wholly devoid of happiness and hope.

Much more relaxing was the pretty park surrounding the city walls, where elderly men and women stretched and exercised under the sun, practiced traditional fan dances and ballads, and played furious games of table tennis like people possessed. One man offered me his paddle after he saw me observing, and his partner shamed me handily despite being well over twice my age.

My lodging was very close to this park. For sheer atmosphere, Shuyuan Youth Hostel in Xi’an was my favorite place to stay in China or Japan. It was just how I imagine a travelers’ hostel should be, warren-like with posters and signs all over the walls, Elvis playing in the attached café and cheerfully inaccurate international food on the menu. My dorm room was on the third floor of an exposed courtyard, reached by one sturdy staircase and one downright questionable staircase, and the bathroom walls lurked somewhere behind a thick smattering of thoughtful, provocative and obscene graffiti. I appreciate the hostel vibe, although I don’t participate much in it – I’m the quiet guy who, behind a cup of coffee and a book, monopolizes the most comfortable sofa – but that vibe is finicky. Very often I’ve watched bands of European and American travelers stumble into a hostel café for breakfast, huddle together in their exclusive cliques, and mumble the usual dreary travelogues (about visas, flight schedules, Kathmandu-this and Varanasi-that) into their toast. The world has all types, but I defy anyone to be more marvelously listless or fantastically boring than a determined traveler.

And I’ve never figured out their daily migration habits. Within a few blocks of a hostel-friendly section of town, I might see outsiders everywhere… but once I get a few hundred meters from that nexus, I won’t spot another all day. Where do they go? Perhaps it’s just the laws of diffusion doing their thing, but I prefer to imagine all the foreigners packed together, waiting out the day in some ridiculous place (like a video arcade or perhaps a tanning salon) until the time at which they can respectably troop over to the expat bars.

I was also surprised that I never saw another obvious foreigner on any of my long-distance trains in China. Granted, they aren’t entirely comfortable for larger westerners – my shoulders were too wide for the aisles, my legs too long for the beds – but traveling does imply a certain need to move from one place to another, and the trains seemed the best way to do it. And I did a lot of it. (By the end of roughly two weeks in China the only Chinese characters I could reliably identify, aside from the currency symbol, were the ones denoting the top, middle and lower bunks on the tickets for hard-sleeper cars.)

The Xi’an railway station, surprisingly, was considerably more frenetic and frantic than the one in Shanghai. The gates opened soon after I arrived for my overnight train and there was a mad rush: belongings were dropped, families separated, and bodies shoved forcefully down the line, moving inexorably but disconnectedly towards the train. People broke into dashes on the platform, jockeying for hard-seat position. Once the dust had settled the train creaked its iron whine, the wheels started their revolutions, and we started our roll towards Chongqing.

One China: Shivering through Shanghai

2010-12-23T19:30:00.000-06:00

My plan was flawless: secure my China visa, get to Kobe, and settle into my reserved bunk on Tuesday morning for a two-night ferry ride to Shanghai.

But as Monday morning dawned, there was no visa in my passport (and no passport, either) and no boat ticket in my pocket. And I was still in Tokyo, four hundred kilometers from my ferry. Now, if this had been the Philippines, something inevitably would have gone wrong – my ferry would have been delayed, the bus to Kobe would have left from the other side of town and I’d’ve missed it, my passport would have been misplaced in a refrigerator or something. But here’s the thing: I still would have made my boat somehow. For all the lack of organization and the casual attitude towards trifling things like schedules and laws, things always just seem to work out.

In Japan, by contrast, nearly everything travel-related ran smoothly. But in order for things to run smoothly, everything must be planned. And that means, had I missed a step, I could easily have been stuck. I didn’t get the sense that some good-humored cajoling could get me where I was going, whereas that is a surefire way to get things done in the Philippines.

Of course, everything did work out: the Chinese consulate released my passport back to me with a tender new visa nestled into its leaves and my ferry was booked with the help of a very patient travel agent in Roppongi. I traveled back up to Tokyo Station, bought a seat on an overnight bus to Kobe, lurked at a bank of in-use baggage lockers until I was able to snipe one from a schoolgirl withdrawing a big fluffy pillow, and stashed my stuff away until the evening. I spent the rest of the day immersed in coffee, reading and Yoshinoya.

And then I was off, riding the smooth highways back to Kansai. My ferry was sparsely occupied – there were a few Chinese passengers, a young Japanese couple who spent their time making skateboarding videos on the deck, a French duo looking for new sights after a stint in Africa, and a British lad gap-yearing his way through the East. Two days is a long time on a boat, and since Tokyo Station’s locker #7059 retained my just-finished copy of Into the Wild, I had only William S. Burroughs’ Junky and a Philippine notebook to occupy my time.

I spent a good amount of that time shivering out on the Xin Jian Zhen’s decks. The suffering (such as it was after the two years of constant Philippine swelter) was worth it for the view of the East China Sea rushing under the hull, and the scarcity of riders made it easy to prowl the decks for provocatively-lighted life preservers.

But my favorite part of the trip was the crawl up the Yangtze and its tributary, the Huangpu, which swerves through and splits Shanghai. These rivers hummed with activity even in the early hours of our arrival: shoreside cranes, to the symphony of their whining gears, lifted massive containers from flatboats; ferries scurried hither and yon with tugboats following in their wakes like dutiful yayas; the yells of sailors cut tunnels through the thick smog-yellowed air.

I stayed at Mingtown Hiker Youth Hostel, a for-real international youth hostel – meaning scads of foreigners. Its big draw is that it lies only a few blocks from the Bund, a rash of stately old European buildings lining the west bank of the Huangpu. The Bund is one of the many leftovers of previous European occupation, from the French Concession district to the German bakeries scattered throughout the city. As a legacy, the Bund is certainly a troublesome artifact – back in the heyday of Shanghai’s Little Europe, Chinese were discriminated against matter-of-factly by the rich foreigners hammering out business deals in the best riverside hotels – but I must admit that the elegant buildings provide aesthetic relief from the skyscrapers that have heralded Shanghai’s entry into the clique of Important World Cities.

The effort to maintain this status is obvious. Many parts of the metropolis are as blankly international as business sections of Tokyo or New York. Signs for the recently concluded Shanghai Expo litter the city – literally, as many of them are decaying and falling off the walls – and the UK’s Seed Palace and other Expo constructions can still be seen hugging the river. And in Pudong, the financial center east of the Huangpu, the futuristic Oriental Pearl TV Tower proudly proclaims Shanghai’s arrival to modernity. It’s a sham: from up close, the spidery legs that from the river’s opposite bank give the skyline its most striking sight are revealed to be just massive cylinders of faceless concrete supporting a gaudy and giant baby’s rattle.

After spending two weeks in Japan, Shanghai also seemed inordinately loud. This I appreciated, actually, because the deathly quiet in Tokyo got a touch creepy at times. And although I had heard horror stories about Shanghai’s busy streets, they were nothing compared to Manila’s screech-and-rumble roadways. Shanghai’s metro system is also efficient and extensive (it’s now the longest in the world by cumulative track length, or at least nearly so), though not as friendly as Tokyo’s.

I spent most of my time in Shanghai, like I spend most of my time anywhere, walking and looking. The touristy shopping-oriented East Nanjing Road was unimpressive – and packed with sketchy men offering women and sketchy women offering themselves – but I stumbled across a little artists’ colony, the name of which I never learned, that was packed with galleries of paintings and photography and calligraphy as well as little eateries and shops. I visited many camera stores, including a Lomography gallery and a huge multifloor complex with dozens of independent sellers hawking lenses, studio supplies and everything else.

I also fulfilled perhaps my dearest ambition for Shanghai, which was to ride the maglev train. It runs from east of Pudong to the Shanghai airport and reaches 431kph, which is about the fastest the average human can travel on land (or very close to land, at least) anywhere in the world. Some of its impact was lost by the fact that the elevated track tended to avoid obstacles instead of zooming under bridges and skimming past skyscrapers (which I felt would have improved the ride immensely), but the surprising wobble and frequent banking injected a mild and pleasant sense of danger. In all, well worth the ride.

My encounters with locals were unfortunately limited and mostly consisted of poor people asking me for money. In one instance, a man approached me as I ate breakfast outside a bakery, pointed to my bilingual bakery bag and proudly pronounced the word “bread” in English. He continued to show off his language skills with various English words until I gave him a muffin. He thanked me brightly and offered me RMB2 for the transaction, which I politely refused, and he shuffled away after taking also an unused sugar packet.

Another time a young man outside a train station gestured for money, pointing to a sign around his neck that proclaimed him to be deaf and mute. I was writing in my journal at the time and he sat down and admired my writing skills while telling me with signs that he himself couldn’t write. I copied down my name for him and asked for his, which he wrote bashfully on his hand in spidery characters, and soon afterwards he took his leave with a big smile and a wave.

One old man asked me for coins, but not as alms: he was a coin collector, he informed me in rusty but intelligible English, and he was trying to find a set of state quarters from the US. I regretfully told him that I couldn’t obtain a set for him. Instead we exchanged pens, leaving me with a 1mm gel monstrosity that felt thick as a paintbrush while he benefited from my .5mm Dong-A, but I think he appreciated having a foreign souvenir. And I did too.

After about four nights in Shanghai, it was time to move on. I visited a booking agency and told them I wanted an overnight train going west or south. After a flurry of confusion, one of the clerks asked me clearly: “Anywhere is okay, sir?” I said yes, anywhere west or south. They held a brief conference behind the desk and decided that I was going to Xi’an, one night’s ride to the west. I cheerfully agreed, knowing nothing about Xi’an except that it was the site of the terracotta warriors and was probably quite touristy, and boarded my sleeper train with a pleasantly blank mindset regarding my destination.

Lights and Sound in Tokyo Town

2010-11-22T00:42:00.000-06:00

Meiji Shrine, Shibuya

Taito

Ueno Park

Ueno Zoo

Shinjuku

Imperial Palace East Garden

Entrance to Yoyogi Park

Meiji Shrine, Shibuya

Tsukiji Fish Market

Tokyo from the Metropolitan Government Building, Shinjuku

Rainbow Bridge, looking across Tokyo Bay from Odaiba

Chinese Café Eight, Roppongi

Colza Teppanyaki, Ginza

Shibuya

Sanja-sama, Asakusa

Taito

Shibuya

Yoyogi Park, Shibuya

Meiji Shrine, Shibuya

Yoyogi Park, Shibuya

Shibuya

We said goodbye, we sang Bon Jovi

2010-11-08T17:36:00.000-06:00

I didn’t get to say goodbye to my favorite bakeshop. When I arrived, neglectful of the fact that my last trip to my town was on All Saints Day, it was shuttered up tight. I missed out on the promise of a free chocolate-oat bar.

I managed to bid goodbye to nearly everyone and everything else important, and many people had two or three separate farewells. My center sent me off with exorbitant thanks, and I can only hope they recognize how much more they deserve my appreciation than vice-versa. Twenty-five children and coworkers (chosen to match up numerically with my age) gave their wishes for me; we ate cake and took pictures; I gave my last speech, a fumbling mix of Ilonggo and English; and I received gifts, trinkets and hugs. Rain poured down my last night in Iloilo and kids splashed in puddles and kicked up mud.

The next day my supervisor, counterpart and a number of the youth picked me up in the city and took me to the airport. We reminisced, we joked, we said our ongoing goodbyes and we sang Bon Jovi.

It’s a sad thing to leave the place after two years, and a ridiculous thing to have planned it that way from the beginning. Maybe the countdown trivializes the time I spent in the Philippines. Literally speaking, I was never anything more than a transient. But I can say with conviction that on many, many occasions, it didn’t feel that way.

I’ve been very careful not to identify my town, my center, and especially my kids on this blog. I wish I could list the last here, post their photos and thank them each for what they gave me. I can’t. I trust that my coworkers know how thankful I am for their kindness and helpfulness, for their patient explanations of things I didn’t understand and for their willingness to work with me. For my kids, I hope they understand the impact they had on my service and the fact that they made my stay what it was – that talking with them, working with them and being part of their family was the core of my two years in their country, and that I probably learned much more from them than they did from me.

I fly out today for Japan, and for now I’ll avoid any mushiness about the Philippines staying in my heart, being my home away from home, et cetera. Platitudes cheapen.

But I’ll be on a bus tonight to Tokyo, and in my head I’ll be singing Bon Jovi.

Iloilo-Go-Round

2010-11-04T01:20:00.000-05:00

Iloilo City isn’t my site, but it has been my refuge. I made the jeepney trip to the city on about a weekly basis, searching for coffee, wifi, food and a chance to escape the heat. In the process I learned the jeep routes (but not the street names), some shortcuts-that-are-not, where to find the best internet connections and which places charge a fee for using wall outlets.

Iloilo is dirty and polluted and sometimes is seems like nothing’s happening, aside from an ill-considered and long-running construction project to add another vehicle flyover to a not-that-important intersection. They are, however, now building the city’s first Starbucks.

But I’m going to miss Iloilo. I’ll miss its cheap pensions as much as its nice hotels, and the cracked sidewalks much more than the several shiny malls.

During the rainy season I cursed its slippery walkways. In the summer I despaired in its shimmering swelter. And after every trip I extracted the black residue from my nostrils, washed off the urban slime and wondered why I bothered.

And of course the reason was simple: it gave me a break. A break from my town, where (and this is not a disparaging comment) two roadside burger stands were as cosmopolitan as it got, aircon was almost impossible to find, and power outages left me in a heat stupor on a daily basis.

I started writing this post in the present tense at first and had to make a conscious effort to change it. I’m gone – hopefully not for good, but at least for the foreseeable future. On Monday night I made the last ride into the city with my supervisor, my counterpart and several of my center’s youth: it was rainy and cars’ tires slopped mud around the pavement, and lights bounced off the puddles and streaked windows.

The next morning, before my flight up to Manila, I couldn’t resist taking one more stroll downtown. I walked past the cafes I’ve frequented, down the streets I’ve walked a dozen times without really seeing them, and through one last market, its floors slick with freshly spilled pigs’ blood and its air smelling of bangus and pasayan.

And then I was leaving, riding the air over the City of Love one last time. Below, 400,000 Ilonggos continued their business; nobody looked up. But I looked down.

Letters from the End

2010-10-29T00:33:00.000-05:00

Thank you for visit here in Iloilo. That’s all.

Thank you thank you ang babait na tito thank you

First and for most… Thank you for being one of my friends. Thank you for the love, care, and understanding that you shared with us. I hope you never forget us especially me.

Pls. take care to your self I miss you and pls. visit and pls. Don’t forget my name Tito Ryan you know you are my first friend Amirican.

Dear Tito Ryan, Thank you so much for sharing your time, talents, skills & knowledge with us here in Iloilo. You know that we love you so much and we will treasure each moments we had spent with you. We love you! & We will miss you!!!

It is a pleasure to say goodbye for you.

Thank you for sharing your time with us :) and may you have a good health specially you and your parent’s and alway’s remember tha[t] you are always in our heart’s! :)

Thank you for all the love and care you share to us. And for all the laughs that we shared together. And thank you because you teach us how to speak English. Hope that you will be back here and stay longer again. Stay what you are! and stay cool!

[R]espect the person who she/he is
[Y]ummy is the name of my friend
[A]cceptable – accept the person who she/he is
[N]ever – don’t say never if you made it
[M]ysteries or mysterious – your life is mysterious but full of God’s Blessings
[U]nity – you can unite to ur community to become strong
[R] is your name Ryan Murphy
[P]rayer – u can help the people by praying to them w/out materials or money
[H]elpful – u can help the people w/out exchange w/out expecting so much.
[Y]ummy is you Tito Ryan you are my Friend

you are the best amirican her in the Philippines

WE LOVE YOU… HALONG! HALONG PIRMI!!!

Beggars and boatmen

2010-10-14T00:26:00.000-05:00

It’s thirteen pesos to cross to Guimaras from Ortiz Port. There’s been talk for years of building a bridge to the little island off Iloilo City, which would eliminate the need for the bangkas and simultaneously sound the death knell for the pretty island province. Guimaras, already threatened by the ugly wall of resorts thrown up at Alubihod Beach, would become, through ease of access, just another retreat island.

For now, Guimaras is protected by a slim expanse of water, a thin membrane easily breached by someone with political will and capital. But it hasn’t happened yet, and so thrives Ortiz, another of the country’s rustic slummy wharves with one short pier and dozens of ramshackle shanties.

But for all its decrepitude, the port provides a degree of livelihood to the many sailors and vendors accommodating beachgoers and cross-water commuters. A bridge would open up Guimaras, but close down the ticket office and the sari-saris and the eateries.

Ortiz is already at the mercy of the air and water: during rainy season the boats migrate to the nearby port at Parola, from which the stronger winds and currents don’t seriously hinder the boats’ passage.

It’s a fragile existence for the polemen and the panhandling street children and the food-sellers. The crumbling pier has certainly seen better days. One wonders if it will survive to see more.