As I left the Bilibago Casino looking for a restaurant, I thought how nice it would be to have company for dinner. I eventually found a Chinese restaurant and felt right at home with the food which looked like and tasted like any Chinese-Jewish restaurant in Toronto. However, sitting alone in a crowded restaurant full of people laughing and talking made me feel somewhat uneasy and I couldn’t wait to eat my chicken sai goo or whatever it was called, pay my bill and get out of there. Restaurants are not for single people.
As lonely as that experience is, there are compensating joys. I am staying in a small town, Dau or Bilibago, depending on the bus you take. It is or they are both on Luzon Island. The hotel is great, everyone knows your name and you are treated like a king. I have breakfast every morning and the same waitress serves me. Over the two or three days we have exchanged information about children, country and so on. I told her on Monday I was going to see something new and travel to Subic on Tuesday, I thought about 2 hours away. She told me it was her day off and her child lived there so she offered to take me. What a bonus. For those of you reading my blog regularly, I felt another Ayuttaya experience coming on and how right I was.
We took every kind of transportation possible. We started out from the hotel where she picked me up with a trike which looked like what the Toronto police used to ride in the 1950’s. We then took an intercity bus that blew such cold air I will probably catch pneumonia. When we got to Alongpanga, about 2 hours away, we took a jeep past Subic, unfortunately, because I really wanted to go there, to a small town called Marcellino. We then got into another trike and rode into the residential part of town. I noticed she did not pay the driver. When I asked her why, she said it was because it was her cousin! More on this to follow.
If you want to get a feeling for what I am about to talk to you about, you should look at the pictures which really did not capture what I saw, but will give you some idea.We went down some dusty roads, formed in a perfect grid pattern, past each house surrounded by bamboo poles and foliage to demarcate their territory. When we got to her house, in about five minutes, the scene will remain with me forever. There were a bunch of toothless men on their haunches working on a motor, the women playing cards and the children running around playing (or scratching in the dirt with sticks). There were chickens and hens running around, the sound of a pig coming from somewhere and a goat eating the foliage. On the one property, there seemed to be about three homes for the different familial groupings, which I never did get clear. There seemed to be grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles and myriad children.
The waitress took me into the house and we walked through the living room to the back kitchen. In the outer part of the kitchen, outside the house, she scooped up some rice and offered it to me. At that stage, I was rather sorry I did not have breakfast that morning. They were so apologetic about their meager surroundings and food. They offered me coffee which I turned down and then tea. Foolishly I said yes to the tea ( iced) and continued talking with the gay cousin, who was flaming and having a great old time. Homosexuality, like in Thailand, seems to be absolutely accepted. The aunt told me one of her little boys is gay but doesn’t know it yet. Anyway, back to the tea story. About 30 minutes later the aunt came back with the iced tea, which she had bought from somewhere. Since this was a weekday, and not a holiday that I know of, I don’t think anyone worked, since they were all there playing cards and fooling around. I have no idea where she would get the money to buy the iced tea and I really felt badly I put her to such expense.
As the day progressed, they offered to let me sleep the night in one of the two bedrooms. I have no idea whose room it was or who I would be displacing but the room had no electricity. as I tried laying on the bed I could touch the ceiling and God knows how I would navigate to get to the outhouse. I politely declined and left by myself (the waitress stayed for the night.) I did take them for supper, at a restaurant of their choosing. They picked the equivalent of Mcdonalds and I noticed ordered too much and had it packed away to take home.
On the way back (and I had to take a few buses, naturally getting lost, which is my wont). I did not expect to be travelling on my own and was not really paying attention on the way down. Anyway I one of the buses I was on, I met a distributor from Coca-Cola going to Manila who offered to show me around. I will take him up on his offer Thursday. His wife has just bought the franchise for Aldo shoes, he has honed the distribution for all of the Philippines by hiring cheaper labour he told me, and all his relatives live in California. It should be a different experience than yesterday!
Now I am off to play golf. My caddy has his day off today and hopefully I can lose a bit of money to him. He told me he has a four wood, about three clubs and putter. I think he told me he was 77, or maybe 67 and has a handicap of 7. It should not be hard for me to lose a few pesos to him!
Just got back home and tried to straighten out the picture. No idea how. Anyway, the caddy was up by three going into the last hole and he was such a great guy I know he muffed four shots to make sure I would win. That's the Philippines for you! The people are truly unbelievable.
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